The garden behind the Black Horse faces south-west, over a golf course and down into the valley, and on a clear evening it is the best seat in Binsted. Clive and Victoria Smith run the pub, and the menu changes with the season. The desserts are the part worth planning around: warm chocolate brownie with vanilla ice cream, sticky toffee pudding, lemon posset with shortbread and raspberry sorbet, summer pudding with elderflower. Children get fish fingers, scampi, sausages, or rigatoni with tomato sauce. Dogs are welcome on leads if you say so when you book, though not in the dining room.
The pub has been the centre of the village for far longer than the food menu. Harry Pethers was landlord from 1928 to 1968, and his wife Win took over after him. During the war, when nearby Ford was bombed, villagers sheltered at the Black Horse. Bill Pethers, born at the pub in 1940, remembered his family's own shelter flooding while the pub stayed dry: "At the Black Horse it was warm, it was light." In the 1960s the village took to electing a "Mayor of Binsted," and the first man they chose was Harry.
For provisions you drive the two miles to Arundel, where Pallant of Arundel sells English and Continental cheeses, charcuterie, pies, and Sussex beers and wines. Binsted Nursery, run by the Tristram family since 1978, grows herbs and container plants, but it is a wholesale supplier rather than somewhere to buy your dinner.
Binsted never gathered itself into a centre. It is a spread-out, wooded place of small fields, hedges, brooks and pasture, threaded by the curving Binsted Lane, and it stayed an independent parish until the 1930s. Come off the A27 and the approach runs through a short tunnel of trees. One warning worth heeding: the eastern arm of Binsted Lane, towards Tortington, is unmade and unsuitable for cars, and satnavs will send you down it anyway.
The Church of St Mary stands above the steep Binsted Rife valley, flint with ashlar dressings, its origins in the mid-twelfth century. Inside are Norman round-arched windows, a carved circular font of the late twelfth century, a medieval piscina and aumbry, and the stumps of a fourteenth-century rood beam. A surviving wall painting shows a three-branched tree and a crowned woman, thought to be St Mary or St Margaret of Antioch. The chancel floor is an opus-sectile mosaic by Powell & Sons, laid in a Cosmati style and reported as the first use of the rediscovered technique for flooring. Thomas Graham Jackson restored the building in 1868 and 1869, when it had become unsafe. The artist Michael Wishart is buried in the churchyard.
The Wisharts brought an artistic thread to this quiet corner. In 1952 or 1953 Lorna Wishart set up a shrine to the Madonna beside a pond here, in memory of her mother; the life-size figure had come from Italy and been blessed by the Pope. It was later vandalised and replaced with a smaller plaster copy, now kept behind a brick surround and an iron grille. Local folklore holds the pond to be bottomless. Luke Jennings, who later invented the characters of Killing Eve, wrote in Blood Knots about trying to land a large fish there as a boy.
Beyond the lanes are about 250 acres of woodland, crossed by eleven public paths and reachable on foot from Arundel through National Park country. Walk materials cover the wildflowers, the history and the local art and literature. Forest Knights runs bushcraft, bow-making and green-woodworking courses in the woods, and the Ratpack Field Archers use some twenty-five acres for archery. The nearest trains are at Barnham.
Back by the pond, the plaster Madonna keeps her place behind the grille, watching over the pond that locals still call bottomless.