On May 8^th, 1857 he was instructed to consult Messrs Hoper & Co. as to “the proper mode of procedure to raise the necessary funds” to effect repairs needed on the roof of the parish church. He was ageing now, but evidently still the same reliable Clerk, for he had his report ready for the meeting arranged for a week’s time, and it was a recurrence of a weakness revealed more than once before in parish government that caused further delay: not enough people turned up at the meeting for a decision to be taken. However, three weeks later the Vestry agreed that the Churchwardens should borrow £100 and that William Milham’s estimate of £75 for brickwork should be accepted. The days when the Vestry dealt with lengthy applications for relief and managed expenditures of at least £100 each month had long since passed.

Richard, probably, was not sorry. He had time to read, to write, to attend functions of the Sussex Archaeological Society of which he was an early member, to sketch, to survey and to enjoy the visits of his grandchildren. Just how frequent these were is not known but on Census Day in 1851 his daughter Mary’s boy, Richard, was staying at the Muddles Green School House, and one of Joseph’s children, Athelstan Elred, was living close by with Simon Peter and his wife, Mary Ann, in their cottage known as The White House. Their own children, Margaret Louise and Phillip Henry, were both now grown up and, according to the Census, were “school assistants”. As Mary Ann’s own description was “schoolmistress” it seems that the Chiddingly School was still flourishing. Athelstan Elred, six years old, must have been one of its pupils for his description was “scholar”.

Perhaps it was about this time or earlier that Richard succumbed to smoking his pipe again. Around 1832 he had written a poem describing how he had broken his pipe and given up smoking, but when he reprinted this in his last book, published in 1862, he added an apologetic little footnote:

“NOTA BENE! These rhymes were written about forty years ago; but (alas for human frailty!) I have again become a smoker of tobacco; and now at four-score I find it, in its moderate use, lawful, like that of wine or any other luxury. It is a great soother of a perturbed spirit, and a useful aid to reflection. Against excess in tobacco, however, as against excess of any other kind, I enter my hearty protest. On reflection, I fancy that ‘forty years ago’, when I wrote these verses, I must have been somewhat of a slave to the ‘weed’.”

There were, though, less cheerful moments. Not since 1819 had Richard and Mary buried an infant child of their family. Now, on January 8^th, 1844, they stood in the Chiddingly graveyard to watch as their baby grand-daughter, Isabel Holman Lower, Mark and Mercy’s daughter, was lowered into her grave. Memories of dead Jemima, of Alfred Ebenezer, Selina, Phillis and Ebonezer must have come flooding back then, and again ten years later when it was 9-year-old Athelstan Elred’s funeral they attended. The young scholar had not died in his natal home in Tunbridge but in Chiddingly.