Place:Tillington, Sussex, England

source: Family History Library Catalog

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

Tillington is a village, ecclesiastical parish and civil parish in the Chichester District of West Sussex, England, 1 mile (1.6 km) west of Petworth on the A272 road. The civil parish includes the hamlets of Upperton, River, and River Common. (The River Rother adjoins the parish.) The land area is 1,416 hectares (3,500 acres or 5.47 sq mi); approximately 500 people lived in 227 households at the 2001 census.

Upperton and Tillington are designated Conservation Areas. There are many old dwellings, including medieval timber framed houses, with one third of the buildings in the parish being grade II listed. Pitshill is a Georgian mansion standing at the head of a valley between Upperton and River. All Hallows Church with its unusual Scots crown tower is a landmark when approaching from Petworth, and is floodlit at night. It was painted by both J. M. W. Turner and John Constable. The church, first recorded in 1100, was mostly rebuilt and enlarged between 1807 and 1837, but retains romanesque sculpture and a plain eight-sided twelfth century stone font.

The northern part of the parish is well wooded, the farmland being a mix of pasture and arable. Ironstone deposits on the lower slopes of the escarpment have been quarried in the pre-industrial era leaving parts of River Common pitted and scarred, now overgrown by naturally regenerated broadleaved woodland. To the south of the sandstone ridge the land slopes gently down to the River Rother having very fertile free draining soils on greensand which are divided into large fields and mostly used for intensive vegetable production. Some of the upper slopes have recently been planted with grape vines.

Research Tips

• The West Sussex Record Office is located in Chichester. Because it holds the records of the Church of England Diocese of Chichester, which covers the whole of Sussex, it has church records relating to both parts of Sussex.
• An on-line catalogue for some of the collections held by the West Sussex Record Office is available under the Access to Archives (A2A) project (a nationwide facility housed at The National Archives, Kew).
• West Sussex Past - database of 2 million records from West Sussex heritage organizations.
• 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.
• 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 Tillington
• British History Online. A History of the County of Sussex does not cover the Rotherbridge Hundred.
• Maps of the local area are to be found on the page for Chichester Rape and on that for Midhurst Rural District.