Berwick

Pubs at Village and Station

The Cricketers Arms is two flint cottages knocked into one, a Harvey's house that the brewery calls the only Sussex pub on CAMRA's national inventory of heritage interiors. The kitchen does a Sussex smokie — smoked haddock in a white wine and mustard sauce, with spinach, mash and a poached egg — alongside Harvey's steak-and-ale pie, beer-battered cod, a Thai green vegetable curry and sticky toffee pudding. Dogs are welcome on short leads, one to a table indoors and more than one outside in the garden.

A little north, up where the railway is, the Berwick Inn is a free house, restaurant and B&B that also runs as a café for commuters off the London line. A sample Sunday menu lists vegan cauliflower hot wings with Thai sweet chilli and coriander, sautéed Moroccan squid, roasts, and the house burger with Emmental and caramelised onion. Three cask ales change on the pumps. It has been the Fuller's Arms and the Berwick Arms in its time, and in the late 1960s and 1970s a London walking club, the Vanguards, would end their Downs excursions here with apple wine before the train home. One member's 1978 proposal made the pub the intended finish of what is now the Vanguard Way, a 66-mile trail.

Paths Between Two Berwicks

Those walks are still the reason to keep boots in the car. The Vanguard Way's ninth section runs 6.5 miles from the station through Alfriston to Exceat Bridge. The Cuckmere Pilgrim Path, a signed circular of roughly twelve to fourteen miles, links seven churches — Alfriston, Berwick, Alciston, Selmeston, Arlington, Wilmington and Lullington — and can be picked up on foot from the station. A quieter loop takes in Arlington Reservoir, the village, Michelham Priory and Lower Dicker in three or four hours.

Berwick is really two places: the main village just south of the A27 between Lewes and Polegate, and the station cluster to the north. The church, St Michael and All Angels, sits apart from both, at the end of a lane that stops when it reaches it. The old village once spread around it, but that has gone back to fields, so the flint church and its shingled spire now stand more or less alone.

Murals, Memory and Mystery

Inside is what most people come for. In 1941 Bishop George Bell of Chichester commissioned Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and Quentin Bell to paint the interior — the first time artists of that standing had been allowed to decorate a whole historic country church. They worked through 1941 and 1942, in a nearby barn belonging to Maynard Keynes, on removable plasterboard panels so the paintings could later be conserved. Grant painted Christ in Majesty above the chancel arch and the crucifix above the tower arch; Vanessa Bell the Annunciation and the Nativity; Quentin Bell the Wise and Foolish Virgins. After Vanessa's Archangels were vandalised, Quentin repainted the pulpit in 1962 with fruit and flowers.

The place is old enough to sit in Domesday. The main Berwick holding was valued then at about a pound and fifteen shillings, with a mill worth ten shillings, eleven acres of meadow and two fisheries; a second, smaller entry, shared with neighbouring Claverham, is recorded separately. A mound in the churchyard has been read as both a prehistoric barrow and a medieval motte, and no one has settled it.

Rainy Days and Firle Companions

For a wet afternoon there is Drusillas Park, in the parish near Alfriston, which keeps some eighty species and favours the smaller exotic animals — sloths, red pandas, meerkats, lemurs and penguins. Charleston, the farmhouse where Bell and Grant actually lived, is a short way off at Firle and makes the obvious companion to the church. Middle Farm nearby sells Sussex cheeses, among them Sussex Marble, Brighton Blue and Lord of the Hundreds, and keeps a cider barn stocked with more than a hundred draught ciders and perries.

The Parish on the Walls

The models the Bells and Grant painted from were their neighbours, so the shepherds and soldiers on the church walls wear the faces of people who once lived in the parish.