St Andrew's church has a tower of chequered flint and stone, and set into it are carved stones that were most likely salvaged from Lewes Priory as it was being pulled down. The nave is Norman, the arcades go back to around 1200, and inside there are thirteenth-century painted flowers and scrollwork, an unidentified female saint on the wall, and a font so heavily restored that little of the fourteenth-century original remains. A monument marks Alexander Carr, who died in 1790. In the Middle Ages the church stood beside navigable Glynde Reach, at what was probably the middle of a small river port.
You will not find much of a village gathered around it. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, there was no recognisable village settlement here. It grew up around its farms and manorial groups rather than a street, and the houses today sit in loose clusters south of the church and along the realigned A27, where the London-to-Newhaven road meets the south-coast road three miles south-east of Lewes.
The place to eat and drink is The Trevor Arms, next to Glynde station. It was built in 1845 for a railway that had not yet arrived, sat closed for eight years, and reopened as a freehouse in July 2025 under Bethany Warren, who grew up in Glynde, and Steve Keegan. Matt runs a local, seasonal kitchen, and there is a barbecue at weekends through the summer. Of the twenty taps, all come from small independent suppliers, mainly local — Burning Sky, Abyss, Beak — and the house beer, Trevor Arms Best, is always on. The pub's own Fourman Brewery, run by Robin, makes cask and keg on site. The garden is large, with tables that look towards Mount Caburn and the Downs. Keegan and Warren call the place "a true community hub for the wonderful locals of Glynde, Beddingham, and beyond."
For groceries and a Post Office there is the village store in neighbouring Glynde. For more of an outing, Middle Farm at Firle is a farm shop with a traditional butcher, a deli, a tea room and an open farm, and it stocks a good deal of Sussex food and drink — Sussex Yeoman, Wealdway and Gun Hill Smoked among the cheeses. Its cider barn holds a national collection of cider and perry.
The walking is the reason to come. Mount Caburn rises to 150 metres immediately to the north, a chalk hill under an Iron Age hillfort where excavation turned up an unenclosed village from around 300 BC, iron slag, loom weights and at least 139 pits used for grain storage and rubbish dumping, along with a slit trench dug during the Second World War. A six-and-a-half-mile circular from Glynde station climbs the hill and returns by dew ponds, chalk tracks and long views over Lewes and Glyndebourne; it takes about four and a half hours and has stiles. Longer routes run over Firle Beacon and Beddingham Hill to Charleston, Firle Place and Furlongs, and the South Downs Way crosses the parish west to east, passing Itford Farm, now a youth hostel.
Furlongs was the cottage of the designer Peggy Angus, who drew an artists' circle to it — Eric Ravilious, John Piper, Edward Bawden. Ravilious and his wife Tirzah Garwood lived in a former Boer War fever wagon there and used a second as a studio. A little away stood Asham House, where Virginia and Leonard Woolf spent weekends and holidays from 1912 to 1919, held their wedding party, and which Virginia used for the short story "A Haunted House." It was demolished in 1994 to extend the landfill.
The Domesday surveyors recorded 121 households here, which made Beddingham one of the larger entries in Sussex; at Preston Court Farm the ground later gave up a Roman villa with a bath-house and a possible temple. Glynde station is unstaffed and has no car park; the Cuckmere community bus stops opposite Preston Court Farm on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays.
Glynde & Beddingham Cricket Club was founded in 1885. In 2009 it won the national village knock-out cup.