Botolphs

A Tower Above the Crossing

St Botolph's flint tower rises from a low spur above the River Adur, and you can pick it out from some distance across the flat valley floor.

Botolphs is not much more than a few farms and houses strung along a winding lane on the west bank of the river. The quiet Annington Road follows the water; the busy A283 runs along the far side. Between them, St Botolph's footbridge carries both the South Downs Way and the Downs Link across the Adur, which is the practical heart of the place: two long-distance trails meeting at a crossing that has been used, in one form or another, since before the Conquest.

Old Bridge and the Walkers' Way

That crossing is the whole story. The church sits at what was probably the main pre-Conquest crossing over the then-tidal Adur, at its narrowest point, and the settlement here was once known as Old Bridge. The river later changed course and silted up, the ford lost its importance, and a busy little port shrank into a farming hamlet. The church itself was called St Peter "of the old bridge" for a few centuries before the dedication to Botolph, patron of wayfarers and river crossings, prevailed.

Walkers are the main traffic now. The South Downs Way arrives after a seven-to-eight-mile stretch from Washington over chalk grassland, past Chanctonbury Ring and a dew pond thought to be Neolithic, before dropping down to the river and the church. From St Botolph's Bridge the riverside path runs north to Bramber, which is where you go for lunch, buses and a bed.

Food Beyond the Hamlet and the Church Within

There is no pub or shop in Botolphs, so food is a short walk or drive away. The Castle Inn at Bramber has an open fire and does traditional fish and chips, pan-roasted trout, a chargrilled Sussex lamb Barnsley chop and Sunday roasts, and keeps water bowls and treats for dogs. At Upper Beeding the Rising Sun, a former brewery that was the Star before it became the Rising Sun by 1851, has recently been reported to serve Harvey's alongside fish and chips with mushy peas, Sunday roasts and rhubarb crumble. Steyning, about two miles off, has the useful shops: the Sussex Produce Company on the High Street carries Sussex crisps, Mamoosh pitta and High Weald Dairy cheeses, and a farmers' market fills the High Street car park on the first Saturday of the month.

Inside the church the age shows plainly. The tall Saxon chancel arch has rustic, leaf-like corbels; faded red and ochre wall paintings survive around it; and three large blocked arches in the north wall mark the aisle that has gone. A drawing from 1802 shows it already vanished, though a reference from 1776 still called it merely ruinous. There is a studded south door of 1630, a Jacobean pulpit with its sounding-board still overhead, a fourteenth-century piscina, and the painted royal arms of Charles II on the west wall. The Churches Conservation Trust, which now looks after the building, calls it "a church that still welcomes wayfarers."

Annington, Bramber and a Longer Day

Domesday found this a richer place than it now looks. The manor of Annington was valued at £25 in 1086, up from £12 twenty years earlier, with forty-nine households, woodland enough for ten swine, and one church.

For a longer day out, Bramber Castle is about a mile and a half north by the river, free to wander, with a single fourteen-metre wall left of the de Braose stronghold on its knoll. St Mary's House nearby, a former pilgrims' inn of around 1470, keeps an Elizabethan Painted Room and five acres of garden.

Arriving via Shoreham and Dacre Gardens

Shoreham-by-Sea, five miles south, is the nearest station; the number 2 bus stops at Dacre Gardens, just across the footbridge. Walkers arrive on foot, off the Downs.