In attempting one day to reach Earnley from Selsey in this way (after giving up the beach in despair), I came upon several adders, and I once found one crossing a road absolutely in Selsey.
Selsey is a straggling white village, or town, over populous with visitors in summer, empty, save for its regular inhabitants, in winter.
The oldest and truest part of Selsey is a fishing village on the east shore of the Bill, a little settlement of tarred tenements and lobster pots.

Selsey church, now on the confines of the town, once stood a mile or more away; whither it was removed (the stones being numbered) and, like Temple Bar, again set up.

The chancel was, however, not removed, but left desolate in the fields.
Selsey Bill is a tongue of land projecting into a shallow sea.

A lighthouse being useless to warn strange mariners of the sandbanks of this district, a lightship known as the Owers flashes its rays far out in the channel.

The sea has played curious pranks on the Selsey coast.
Beneath the beach and a large tract of the sea now lies what was once, four hundred years ago, a park of deer, which in its most prosperous day extended for miles.