O'er moorland and brae: Under the nave

Bosham harbour is extraordinary. When the tide is out you can walk across the bottom of the inlet from one side of one peninsula to another. There is even a narrow footpath across the soggy waterway that is well trodden, and well used by the locals. We chose, instead, to drive around the bay, on a road built onto the seabed, pitted with little waterholes left by the outgoing tide. It is wise not to park, or leave your car here, as the tide rolls in like a train when it decides to return and covers the entire road, and beyond.

In fact, the tide covers much of the lower part of village and several of the car parks. Houses and businesses close to the harbour have concrete or wood barriers permanently in place to hold back the tide. You have to step high over these in order to enter the premises. Quite novel for us. And despite this regular tidal influx Bosham's real estate prices are remarkably high: most of the cottages and houses in the village run to the million pound mark, and over.

People want to live here. Bosham is an old, old village, and probably one of the most historically interesting in this part of the world. It is so old it is pronounced Boz-um in a kind of slurred and drunken manner. I love the way it sounds.

Irish saints had a chapel in Bosham in the 5th century. Which is intriguing. Practically every coastal village we have come across in the past three months seems to have a new and different Irish priest or royal princeling, sail from Ireland in a wee boat in order to convert the unchristian hoards that were here at the time. Amazing numbers of them. And they were apparently all royal. And terribly religious. Their missionary tendencies must have depleted much of the total population of Ireland in the 5th and 6th centuries, I fear.

Bosham church, too, is old: its crypt is supposed to have been the chapel for the Irish missionaries, tho' there is some doubt that it was. Quite possibly the ground beneath the crypt was where the Irish saints had their first chapel: that is often how history goes in these coastal villages.

The Viking king, Canute, lived here, too. It is said that his eight year old daughter drowned in the nearby mill stream and was buried in the Bosham church. The vicar and the parishioners dug up a child's tomb in 1865 and it was on display for a time, but when reopened a century later, was found to contain no bones, so that remains a mystery, still, but has not prevented the parishioners from this era covering that spot with a memorial stone to the child.

The arch on the inner entrance door of the church has an assortment of small crucifixes scarred into the stone. These, the local tales tell us, are remnants of Richard's Crusaders, making their mark with their swords as they returned from the Holy Wars. Graffiti, we would call it these days. Even vandalism. But, how times change perspective: the crusaders could do no wrong, and these marks are now treasured almost as art.

Bosham church was where Harold Godwinson went to pray before heading across to Normandy to negotiate with King William about the throne of England. A tiny stitched panel on the Bayeux Tapestry shows Harold entering the Bosham church before heading down to the harbour to board his boat for France. It was Harold's eventual duplicity that caused William the Conqueror to cross the channel and invade England and end Anglo-Saxon rule forever.

So, the history of England is writ large in this tiny historical village of Bosham. In the church, particularly.