The South Downs shepherd who had a haunting vision

Many years ago a shepherd tending his flock on the South Downs had a rather strange encounter.

The other-worldly apparition he said he had seen captured imaginations far beyond Sussex.

His story hit the national headlines and continues to be remembered in local histories and documentaries today.

One morning in 1940, Fred Fowler was working on the slopes of Firle Beacon in East Sussex.

Perched atop the hill with his crook, accounts say he saw a radiant figure clothed in white.

According to newspaper coverage from the time, the 66-year-old “lifted his weather-beaten face skywards… way above the highest peak of the Sussex Downs”.

“There in the clear blue sky. A vision they calls it – it was the like of something which I never see before,” he is reported as saying.

“It be Christ I see.”

The shepherd, from Firle, was reportedly shaken by the experience and shared his story with fellow villagers.

“I knew what I had seen was really there,” he is quoted as saying. “There were other people who had seen it, too.

“But mine’s a simple life – I just have me two dogs, me sheep and me missus way back at the cottage and I come to church on a Sunday. That’s all I sees or knows of life; that’s all I really want to see or know.

“I forgot,” he smiled. “There’s my pint I always have of a night,” the newspaper report continues.

Word of Mr Fowler’s vision spread quickly.

In a rural community where faith and folklore often intertwined, it became a subject of fascination.

The Daily Mirror picked up the story, presenting what happened as a moment of mystical wonder.

A cutting of the article from 8 November is still displayed in the vestry of St Peter’s Church, Firle.

However, Rev Peter Owen-Jones, Anglican priest and author, told BBC Secret Sussex that when Mr Fowler saw the newspaper story – headlined ‘shepherd tells of a vision in the sky’ – “he wasn’t altogether pleased because they kind of cast him as some country bumpkin”.

The vicar at the time, Reverend AG Gregor, dismissed the whole thing as “nonsense”, according to then news reports.

But others still aren’t so sure.

“Maybe he was having a bad day,” said Mr Owen-Jones. “Maybe his cat got run over. Maybe he ate far too much at lunch. There could be 1,000 things.

“I for one certainly feel that on that ridge, especially on that beacon, that it’s what the Celts would have called a thin place” – that is, somewhere where the veil between the physical and spiritual realms is permeable.

“As the parish priest here, I have heard stories of things that have happened up there that I cannot explain.”