The Black Horse stands in Byworth with an eighteenth-century front grafted onto something older, faced in stone rubble with red-brick dressings and a former maltings beside it. Inside there is a large fireplace, a fire kept going through winter, old photographs and prints on the walls, and a separate bar and restaurant. The terrace outside looks down into the Shimmings Valley, which people here call Little Switzerland.
The kitchen runs wider than the size of the place suggests. There is beer-battered cod with hand-cut chips and crushed peas, a char-grilled burger with smoked bacon and cheddar, a Thai red king-prawn curry, pan-roasted guinea-fowl supreme with champ, peas and leeks, calves' liver and smoked bacon, and a sweet aloo curry with dhal, pilau rice and naan. Puddings are sticky toffee and a lemon posset with berries.
The bar keeps cask ale and real cider. Hogs Back TEA and Young's London Original are the regulars, with Arundel Sussex Gold, Bowman Swift One and Young's London Special among the beers that come and go. Dogs are welcome if they stay quiet, on a lead held by a person and off the soft furnishings; well-behaved children are fine in the restaurant and the garden.
Byworth itself is small, a lane of stone cottages a mile east of Petworth, reached by leaving the town on the A283 and turning into The Street. The grocery, post office and bakery that once stood minutes from the pub are long gone, and there is no shop in the hamlet now. For food to carry home you go into Petworth, where The Hungry Guest sells bread, cheese, its own venison, and the sausages and brownies it has won awards for, alongside croissants, tarts and cinnamon buns.
The Shimmings Valley Walk passes through Byworth on its three-mile circuit between Petworth and Byworth, and it earns the word strenuous: steep steps drop into the valley, then a long climb past Lovers Lane and Brinksole Heath, across the Haslingbourne stream and the Virgin Mary Spring. Longer routes run out to Coultershaw Mill and the old Petworth railway station. Expect kissing gates, stiles, long gradients and fields that sometimes hold horses; the odd tall stile means a small dog may need lifting over.
The Gothic building near the pub was the village infant school, put up around 1860. The bell still sits in its pointed north gable, though the school is a house now. On Sundays it doubled as a church, a curate walking over from Petworth for the evening service. Petworth's own parish church, St Mary the Virgin, is the grander thing to see: a thirteenth-century chancel, a private gallery built for the owners of Petworth House, stained glass by Kempe and Comper, and a rose window of German glass the church believes is almost the only English survivor of its kind. Its high altar remembers the children killed when Petworth Boys' School was bombed in 1942.
Petworth House is a seventeenth-century house of Van Dycks, Turners and Grinling Gibbons carving, with a Capability Brown pleasure garden and a seven-hundred-acre deer park of fallow deer. The nearest station is Pulborough, with the No. 1 bus running through Petworth and passing within a hundred yards of the Black Horse.
The pub was once kept by a retired Metropolitan policeman and his wife, who moved in with five children soon after his retirement in 1929; he ran the bar and she cooked and washed. Water came up from a well under the scullery, and the little private bar stayed lit by paraffin long after the mains reached the rest of the house. One regular is remembered for arriving on a delivery day with a fox on a lead.