Bramber

The Inn and the One-Street Village

The garden at the Castle Inn runs down to a stream and seats seventy-two, which is a good deal of garden for a village of one street. An inn or coaching house has stood on the site since the early thirteenth century; the oldest part of the present building is seventeenth-century, and it has carried the Castle Inn name since Victorian times. The kitchen does traditional fish and chips, pan-roasted trout and a chargrilled Sussex lamb Barnsley chop, and the Sunday menu extends to duck-and-orange pâté, roast leg of lamb, confit pork belly and a roast vegetable-and-cashew Wellington. Harvey's Sussex Best and Downlands Bramber are the regular ales, with Dark Star Hophead or Riverside changing alongside. Dogs get treats and bowls, and there are dining areas and bedrooms set aside for them.

That matters more than it might, because there are no shops in Bramber at all. For those you go to neighbouring Steyning, or across the Adur to Upper Beeding. The Tollgate, a sixteen-bedroom B&B, is without a working kitchen for now while its communal areas are rebuilt, and sends its guests to the Castle Inn to eat.

A Pilgrim House and Norman Church

Bramber is essentially one linear street, originally a causeway, laid in the lee of the Downs where the Adur floodplain begins. You can take that in slowly. St Mary's House stands along it: a close-studded timber-framed range, the surviving fifteenth-century wing built for the Wardens of the Bridge, monks from Sele Priory. The pilgrim inn on the site dates from around 1470. Inside there are original first-floor casements, fine chimney-pieces and a painted-panelled room; outside, five acres hold animal topiary, a ginkgo, Victorian pineapple pits and a set of themed garden rooms. Roger Linton and Peter Thorogood bought the semi-derelict house in 1984 and restored it with friends and volunteers. Simon Jenkins later listed it among "England's Thousand Best Houses". There is a tearoom, and you can visit it without buying a ticket for the house and gardens.

Up the slope sits the Church of St Nicholas, founded around 1073 as the castle church of William de Braose and still largely Norman. The crossing capitals are the thing to look for: carved heads, and what may be a fox and a goose, which Nairn and Pevsner called "a perfect example of late C11 work in Caen stone". The tower above them is a hollow eighteenth-century addition.

The Rise and Fall of Bramber Castle

De Braose raised Bramber Castle here by 1073 to run the surrounding rape. It passed out of the family's hands early in the next century when King John seized it after Lady de Braose refused to hand over her sons as hostages; she and the boys later starved in Windsor Castle. Subsidence brought the castle down in the sixteenth century, and its stone went into local roads. What is left is free to walk in during daylight, dogs on leads, though the track up is muddy and uneven. The keep wall still stands about fourteen metres high.

Along the Adur

The Riverside Walk for All follows the Adur for an easy, broad surfaced 2.2 miles out and back from The Street, wide enough for wheelchairs and pushchairs, with herons and kingfishers along it. From the same footbridge you can pick up the South Downs Way and the Downs Link; Monarch's Way also crosses the parish. The Downs Link runs south to Botolphs and Shoreham-by-Sea, four miles off, where the nearest station is. Below the castle, Bramber Brooks spreads across more than forty acres of old medieval salt workings, with new ponds and raised walkways finished in 2025 and a community orchard of Egremont Russet and Sussex Mother apples.

Walter Potter's Curious Legacy

The strangest resident was Walter Potter, who grew up at the Castle Inn when it was the White Lion and put his first tableau of stuffed animals in the garden in 1861. His museum of comic taxidermy — two-headed lambs, four-legged chickens — drew excursion crowds for decades before it moved on in the 1970s and was sold off at auction in 2003. One of his canaries survives in the Steyning Museum, which is as close as Bramber now keeps him.