Bury

Farm Shop and Freehouse

Charlie's Farm Shop at Southview Farm sells unpasteurised milk from a Guernsey herd the Hughes family has kept since 1919, when they started with seven cows. Ian and Julie Hughes began selling unpasteurised milk and cream in 1980, and the Hughes family are still Sussex's longest-standing sellers of raw milk. The butcher's counter hangs its beef for 21 to 28 days and cures ham and bacon on site, alongside milk-fed pork and rose veal. A mobile fish stall run by Andrew Johnson turns up weekly, and the shelves carry Sussex fruit and vegetables, eggs, cheese, bread from Sødt Bakery and the Hungry Guest, and drink from Nutbourne Vineyard, Stopham Estate, Arundel Brewery and Hepworth.

The village pub is the Squire & Horse, on the A29 at Bury Common in a 16th-century building that opened as the White Horse. Nicholas and Wendy have run it as a family freehouse for more than 26 years, with Nicholas, who is Australian, cooking. The pub's long comment book records pheasant, lamb, Thai fishcakes and satay chicken, with rhubarb frangipane tart and passion-fruit pavlova to finish. Bury once had a second pub, the Black Dog and Duck on The Street; it is a private house now, as is the former village stores, now a house called Gargoyles.

Village Fabric and Norman Foundations

Beyond the pub and the farm shop there is a nursery and a petrol station on the main road, and a small shop over at West Burton. Provision is scattered rather than concentrated in one place. The core of it sits east of the A29, below the chalk, with old cottages thatched or roofed in Horsham stone and the church and manor standing near the river. The nearest station is Amberley, just over the Arun at Houghton Bridge; buses through the village, the 69 and the 71, run only a few days a week each and are worth checking before you count on them.

That church is St John the Evangelist, Grade I, with nave walls from the 12th century and most of the rest from the 13th. Fécamp Abbey in Normandy probably directed the building after the Conquest, and Fécamp held the manor too: Domesday lists Bury, spelled Berie, as the property of the Holy Trinity Abbey there, with seventy households, one fishery and one church, and a value that had doubled from twelve pounds to twenty-four in the twenty years since 1066. Inside there is oak chancel panelling and a reredos by Nathaniel Hitch, and an altar carved by J. Philips to a design by the vicar, John Sale, who held the living from 1887 to 1915. Historic England dates the broached shingled spire to 1803.

Paths across the Downs

Three long-distance paths pass through the parish. The South Downs Way drops off Amberley Mount, crosses the Arun on the footbridge by Houghton Bridge and climbs Bury Hill toward Bignor; take care where it meets the A29. The Coffin Trail is gentler, a 1.3-mile path from West Burton to St John's that villagers once used to carry their dead here, West Burton having no consecrated ground of its own. A recent makeover swapped its stiles for kissing gates, and in May the woods along it fill with wild garlic. The West Sussex Literary Trail passes through as well, on its way from Horsham to Chichester Cathedral.

Galsworthy, Ferry and Wharf

The literary connection is John Galsworthy, who lived at Bury House from 1926 to 1933 and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932. He used to cross the Arun by the Bury–Amberley ferry, a crossing the Dukes of Norfolk held the right to and which ended in the 1950s. Bury Wharf, downstream, once took timber and coal off barges named Neptune, Mayflower and Old Sixty-nine, and on cleaned-out days the same barges were horse-towed downriver to the Black Rabbit at Arundel for children's outings.

The Last Ferryman

The last ferryman, Bob Dudden, taught the village children to swim in the river. The ferry is gone, but the stone steps down to the water are still there, giving villagers a right to launch boats.