Mayfield

My late father-in-law worked in Mayfield at a beautiful garden with planted with many azaleas and rhododendrons. Martin attended the village primary school.

The village sign caught my attention and on further investigation there’s a lot of folklore about St Dunstan putting a horseshoe on the devil’s cloven hoof and not taking it off until the devil had agreed to not enter any dwelling with a hung horseshoe, saving the village. St Dunstan was a Benedictine monk who later became Archbishop of Canterbury.

“St Dunstan, as the story goes,
Once pull'd the devil by the nose
With red-hot tongs, which made him roar,
That he was heard three miles or more.”

He also gets a mention in Dicken’s Christmas Carol.