Place:Hellingly, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

the text in this section is based on an article in Wikipedia

Hellingly (pronounced 'Helling-lye') is a village and civil parish now in the Wealden District of East Sussex, England.

The entirely rural and suburban village is centred exactly 1.5 miles (2.4 km) north of the small town of Hailsham. The dependent village of Lower Dicker is within the boundaries of the parish.

The village, like many others on the Weald, was involved in the Wealden iron industry. The watermill connected with the industry is no longer in operation. Horselunges Manor is a moated Tudor manor house, restored by Walter Godfrey in the 1930s.

Hellingly contains the confluence of the River Cuckmere and one of its tributaries, the Bull River, close to the centre of the historic village. The village stands on the lower southern slopes of the gentle uplands forming the Weald and surrounds a circular mound on which the church (dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul) stands.

In 1951 a major realignment of the local parish borders resulted in Hellingly's loss of 544 acres (about 9% of its total area) on its northern face to a newly created parish of Horam. Horam had previously been a village in the south of the neighbouring parish of Waldron and a station on the local railway line.

Hellingly now covers an area of 19.6 km2 (7.6 sq mi) and had a population of 1,820 in the UK census of 2011.

Research Tips

• The East Sussex Record Office, The Keep, Woollards Way, Brighton, BN1 9BP, United Kingdom (email thekeep@eastsussex.gov.uk) holds material for the Archdeaconry of Lewes, present-day East Sussex, and therefore generally holds historical material for East Sussex parishes only. An on-line catalogue for some of the collections held by the East Sussex Record Office (ESRO) is available under the Access to Archives (A2A) project (a nationwide facility housed at The National Archives, Kew).
• The Institute of Heraldic and Genealogical Studies' Sussex Collection (PDF). This is a 9-page PDF naming the files relating to Sussex in their collection-a possible first step in a course of research.
• Further resources may be found on GENUKI's main page on Sussex.
• The National Library of Scotland has a website which provides maps taken from the Ordnance Survey England & Wales One-Inch to the Mile series of 1892-1908 as well as equivalent maps for Scotland itself. The immediate presentation is a "help" screen and a place selection screen prompting the entry of a location down to town, village or parish level. These screens can be removed by a click of the "X". The map is very clear and shows parish and county boundaries and many large buildings and estates that existed at the turn of the 20th century. Magnification can be adjusted and an "overlay feature" allows inspection of the area today along with that of 1900. The specific map from the series can be viewed as a whole ("View this map") and this allows the inspection of the map legend (found in the left hand bottom corner. Becoming familiar with the various facilities of these maps is well worth the trouble.
• GENUKI on Hellingly
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the WeRelate page for Pevensey Rape and on that for Hailsham Rural District or Eastbourne Rural District.
• A History of the County of Sussex provided by British History Online does not include articles on parishes that were part of Pevensey Rape.