The George at Burpham serves chargrilled octopus with smashed cannellini, chorizo and pistachio, a lamb merguez Scotch egg with preserved-lemon yoghurt, and South Coast dressed crab. Roast cod arrives with Nutbourne tomato, samphire and aioli; there is aubergine caponata with panisse and goat's curd for anyone skipping the meat, and sticky date pudding to finish. Martin and Charlotte Bull run the kitchen, which has won AA Rosettes and sources most of its produce within twenty miles, including cask ale from Fauna Brewing over in Arundel.
The pub was not always the George. It was the George & Dragon until 2013, when it was heading for closure and a group of villagers bought it instead, refurbished it, and reopened it as a community-owned house. Dogs are welcome.
Behind the pub, the car park is shared with the recreation ground and looks out across the Arun Valley. The ground is home to Burpham & Warningcamp Cricket Club, which keeps a pavilion, a defibrillator and a grass net there. It is also the north end of a scheduled Iron Age fort, later reused as an Anglo-Saxon burh and one of the defensive works linked to Alfred the Great; the name is simply burh, fort, and ham, village — say it "Burrfam." When the site was dug before the pavilion went up in the early 1970s, it gave back about 170 postholes and pottery running into the late-Saxon and early-Norman years.
That same car park is where the walks begin. The longest is the Amberley, Burpham and North Stoke circular, a moderate ten or eleven miles over four or five hours. From Amberley station it climbs High Titten to the South Downs Way, crosses Amberley Mount and Rackham Banks, comes down through Burpham, and drops to the Arun floodplain and the secluded hamlet of North Stoke, whose small church has barely changed since the Middle Ages. There are two steep pulls and some uneven ground, but gates rather than stiles throughout.
The river shaped all of it. Burpham sits above the Arun's broad floodplain, where the channel cuts through the chalk and flood banks now hold a river that once wandered where it liked. The views run a long way up the valley.
St Mary the Virgin, the parish church, is Grade I and holds several centuries at once: a Norman north transept, a Transitional nave arcade, a thirteenth-century chancel, a fifteenth-century tower. A twelfth-century arch carries undercut chevron moulding found nowhere else in Sussex; the carved oak bench ends are fifteenth-century and rare in the county; there are seventeenth-century German glass roundels, and a font with one plain face, apparently left plain because it was meant to stand against a wall. A small window in the north wall is dated to around the middle of the eleventh century.
The churchyard rewards a slow walk. A headstone from 1789 shows the jockey Benjamin Brewster at full gallop. Mervyn Peake, who began writing Titus Groan while living at nearby Warningcamp in 1940, is buried here with his wife Maeve Gilmore. So is Tickner Edwardes, a former vicar who wrote books about honey bees.
The Domesday commissioners counted thirty households here in 1086, along with eight acres of meadow and woodland that rendered three swine. They valued the whole manor at eight pounds, exactly what it had been worth in 1066.
Arundel is the nearest station, about two miles off on the Southern line; the village itself is reached along Burpham Road, and the George warns satnav users to set a stop in the village so the route does not send them the wrong way. Buses don't run directly into the village, so check timetables if that's your plan. Arundel Castle, whose motte was raised in 1068, is a short drive, and Amberley Museum sits out towards the Downs.
Some local walks start at that car park behind the George; the Amberley circular itself starts and finishes at Amberley station. Either way, walkers are welcome at the pub when they're done.