From my childhood home in Ifield in Sussex to a village called Crosshill in Ayrshire, Scotland is a road journey of 435 miles which the Automobile Association estimate would take seven and a quarter hours of continuous driving. Yet my childhood home was called Crosshill and was named after this village. My home was one of a pair of semi-detached homes. The other was called Straiton and that is named after the neighbouring village to Crosshill.
When returning home from a recent holiday in Scotland there was an opportunity to visit Crosshill in Ayrshire and see just what my old home had been named after.
Like many a Scottish village it is quite an attractive place.
Here we have some of the main street and just opposite here there is a Post Office and store where I was allowed to copy an old photo they had hanging up.
This photo, to judge by the car, dates from my childhood era.
We also had it pointed out to us where we could see more photos from the past.
The square had a war memorial and of course, it still does.
This is King Street in 1913 – a dozen or so years after my home was built.
A similar view now.
And this was my childhood home – the right half of the pair. The left half is Straiton.
Tags: Ayrshire, Crosshill, Ifield, Scotland, Sussex, then and now
Locksands Life 
November 23, 2018 at 8:45 pm |
My grandparents owned Crosshill in Ifield, my mother and her siblings were born there, their surname was Rapley and the spinsters that lived in the end cottage, Beatrice and Alice are cousins of my mothers.
The only people I knew that lived in Crosshill later were the Frost family. Daughter named Paula with whom I went to school with, my surname was Sheppard.
It was really interesting to read your childhood memories and to see old pictures of Ifield.