The young son of the landowners, Charles Goring, planted the beech trees of Chanctonbury Ring in 1760. There are various romantic tales about their birth – that as a child he ran around the hill scattering their seeds, or that he often went up the hill with a little flask of water to tend to his little seedlings. A less sympathetic story tells of him sending his poor servants up the hill with buckets of water! A more pro-proletariat version has the lowly girls and boys of the village sowing the beechnuts.
(collected together in Westwood and Simpson’s ‘Lore of the Land’ (2005).)