Cuckfield Life

Cuckfield's Cuckoo Fayre

Welcome to Cuckfield Life’s Cuckoo Fayre event page. Here you will find our most recent information for everything regarding the fayre.

The annual Independent State of Cuckfield Cuckoo Fayre takes place on May Day Bank Holiday Monday every year in the Recreation Ground, from 12noon, with the official opening by the current Mayor at 1pm. Entry is free.

See also, The Independent State of Cuckfield
Cuckfield Parish Council

2025’s Cuckoo Fayre will be on Monday 5th May. Stay tuned for more information to come!

Cuckfield Village Show

Welcome to Cuckfield Life’s Cuckfield Village Show event page. Here you will find our most recent information for everything about the show.

See also, Cuckfield Village Show Facebook
The Cuckfield Society

2025’s Village Show will be held on 6th September. More information to come.

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Cuckfield Village Show 2024

There’s less than a month to go to this year’s annual Village Show and the organisers are hoping for a record number of entries, particularly in the fruit and vegetable classes.

TV gardener Monty Don says the heavy rainfall, coupled with bouts of warm weather, makes for ideal growing conditions. Local gardeners are hoping for more sunshine than showers and confirm that the next couple of weeks will be make or break time for prize- winning produce.

Meanwhile advertising boards promoting the show have been popping up all over village, courtesy of Marcus Grimes Estate Agents, this year’s main show sponsors along with Cuckfield Golf Centre who have once again covered the printing costs of the show guides. Marcus, pictured here with assistant Abbie Vickery, has been the local estate agent for the past 36 years and believes events like this are important in bringing the community together.

He says; “Rural communities across the UK are suffering as schools, banks, pubs, and GP surgeries close. New research reveals that more and more villages are at risk as rural life is eroded. Yet here in Cuckfield we are bucking the trend. That’s why I believe events like the Cuckoo Fayre and the Village Show are so important and deserve our support.“

Niki Smyth CEO and Events Manager at Cuckfield Golf Centre, and 180 Degrees Bar and Kitchen agrees. “We are proud to be part of such a wonderful thriving and friendly village. We are so lucky to be surrounded by beautiful countryside, with the convenience of excellent transport links to London, Brighton and Gatwick Airport. We will always help where we can and were pleased to not only print the show guide, but offer a prize for the silent auction.”

Join us Saturday 7th September at Cuckfield Baptist Church

Classes include:
Horticulture - Fruit Vegetables Flowers
Food and Drink - Baking Preserves/Drink
Floral Art
Crafts
Art
Photography
Juniors

Click the image above to enlarge the comprehensive category list.

Gideon Mantell and the ‘Cuckfield Dinosaur’

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By Phillipa Mallin

In around 1820, a particularly interesting fossil was discovered at one of the quarries on Whitemans Green, Cuckfield, and was shown to Lewes doctor and palaeontologist Gideon Mantell. From boyhood, Mantell had been fascinated by the shells and fossils he found in the chalk quarries near his home in Lewes. He had studied medicine and anatomy in London before returning to Lewes to be a doctor but in his spare time he studied the geology of Sussex. When he was introduced to the Whiteman Green quarries in 1817, he realised the rock here was much older than anything he had seen before, dating from between 65-130 million years ago, the period we now refer to as the Cretaceous era. He wrote that the ridge on which Whitemans Green stands was once part of a huge river delta ‘a mighty river flowing in a tropical climate over sandstone rocks through a country of palms and tree ferns inhabited by turtles, crocodiles and other reptiles’ Mantell was often accompanied by his wife Mary on his visits to Cuckfield.
She shared her husband’s interest in geology and was a skilled artist, illustrating his book ‘The Fossils of the South Downs’ with engravings taken from his sketches. The site of the quarries is now marked by a plaque near the main Whitemans Green car park, the quarries having been probably filled in around 1847 but in the regency period they were an important source of stone for amongst other things the transformation of Brighton from a small fishing village to a fashionable resort. Stone was also needed to upgrade local roads with increased stagecoach traffic, Cuckfield being an important staging post at the time.

The unusual fossil (pictured) that Mantell was shown in around 1820 appeared to be a tooth - Mantell had instructed Leney, his quarryman, to concentrate on finding teeth and this was found with other teeth and large bones, all from the same creature. Mantell thought it was likely to have been a plant eater because of the heavy pattern of wear on the teeth. A visit to the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London convinced him that the animal was a reptile when he saw the teeth of an iguana that matched his fossil teeth.

He named his find Iguanodon or ‘iguana teeth’ in an academic paper ‘Notice on the Iguanodon, a newly discovered reptile, from the sandstone of Tilgate Forest in Sussex’ which was presented to the Royal Society on 10th February 1825. It was only the second dinosaur to be named. It is this 200th anniversary that is being celebrated in Sussex this year, centred in Lewes but with a talk by Lewes Town Guide Debby Matthews at The Old School in Cuckfield on Thursday 6th March at 2.30pm where she will look at the importance of Cuckfield, its quarries in Mantell’s career and of its place in the study of palaeontology. Debby has long had an interest in Mantell as she is a Lewes Town Guide and lives in the house in which he was born in Station Street. For a list of events and more information about our Cuckfield talk, see the Cuckfield Museum website: www.cuckfieldmuseum.org

“6th March at 2.30pm
The Life and Times of Gideon Mantell
Old School, Cuckfield RH17 5JZ
Talk about the discoverer of the Cuckfield iguanodon by Debby Matthews. Organised by Cuckfield Museum ”
— (£5 ticket, events@cuckfieldmuseum.org)

Mantell went on to discover other dinosaur species at Whitemans Green including Megalosaurus, Hylaeosaurus and Pelorosaurus but it was his first named species, the Iguanodon, with its distinctive thumb spikes, used as a herbivore to crack seeds and nuts and also to defend itself, which is always thought of as ‘The Cuckfield Dinosaur’. Many people will be surprised to know that the original Iguanodon tooth given to Gideon Mantell by quarryman Leney is now in the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand. It was taken to New Zealand by his son Walter, a keen natural scientist, who went to live there after his father’s death in in 1852.

Cuckfield Museum will reopen on 15th February with its permanent dinosaur exhibition including original bones from the Whitemans Green quarries and fossil activities for children. Opening hours are WednesdaySaturday 10am-12.30pm.