Bignor

The Villa Beneath the Fields

On a south-facing slope above a valley, under a set of covered, protective buildings, lie the mosaic floors of a Roman villa that lay hidden in a farmer's field before anyone knew it was there. In 1811 George Tupper struck the summer dining-room's basin with his plough. John Hawkins of nearby Bignor Park took charge of the digging and brought in the antiquary Samuel Lysons to supervise; the first shelters went up in 1812, and visitors have been coming since 1814. The Tupper family still runs the place.

What began around AD 200 as a timber-framed building had become masonry by around AD 225–250 and, by the early fourth century, a courtyard villa with baths, hypocausts and mosaics that remain in situ under cover. The finds include jewellery, statuary, pottery, lead water pipes and the burial of a female baby. There is a tearoom doing cream teas, a picnic area with downland views, and Roman-armour talks.

Farm Seasons and Medieval Fabric

A short way off, Bignor Farms is run by Will and Lisa Tupper and turns over with the seasons: a sunflower maze, a pumpkin patch, farm visits and a campsite.

The Parish Church of the Holy Cross is Grade I and mostly thirteenth-century, though the chancel arch is Norman and the font is a plain eleventh-century tub. Inside there is a mid-fourteenth-century screen with its original cusped roundels, an arcaded chest of around 1400, and Kempe glass of 1883. G. E. Street restored the building in 1876–78. Historic England, weighing it up, settled on "average quality medieval church not over-restored." It appears in Domesday, where Bignor sat in Bury hundred with sixteen households and two mills valued together at twenty-eight shillings.

Ridge Paths and Country Inns

The South Downs Way runs along the ridge at Bignor Hill and crosses one of the clearest surviving stretches of Stane Street, the Roman road, whose raised agger still reaches about ten metres wide. From Slindon, a moderate six-and-a-half-mile National Trust circuit climbs through woodland to Gumber Corner, follows a mile of that same road past chalk grassland with pyramidal orchids, and reaches Nore Hill Folly with the sea in view; there are stiles and tree roots, and dogs need close control because of livestock. A longer eleven-mile loop from Duncton Hill takes in Crown Tegleaze, Upwaltham, West Burton and Sutton. The National Trust car park on Bignor Hill is free, and, being a Dark Sky Discovery Site, the hill gives you the Milky Way on a clear night.

For dinner you go out of the village. The White Horse at Sutton has an AA-Rosette kitchen under Ben Miller, cooking slow-cooked pork belly with five-spice miso caramel and a Sussex cheeseboard of Idle Hour, Sussex Blue, Woodside Red and Sussex Camembert. Sir Ian Anstruther saved it from closure in 1972 and appears as the groom on the sign. The Squire & Horse on Bury Common has been run by Nicholas and Wendy for more than twenty-six years, with Nicholas at the stove.

Bignor Park in Art and War

Bignor Park, private but visible in the history, was the childhood home of the poet Charlotte Turner Smith, who filled her verse with it; Constable came in 1834 and painted watercolours. During the First World War it became a Red Cross hospital under Josephine Johnstone, who was seventy-one when it opened and treated 513 patients in 1917 alone.

Planning the Approach

Amberley station is 3.3 miles off, the approach lanes are narrow and patchily surfaced, and the bus needs at least 30 minutes' notice. One option is to come by car, park at the top of the hill, and walk down into the village where a plough turned up Roman mosaics in 1811.