The Cowdray Estate cottages give themselves away by their woodwork, painted a particular yellow that the estate traces to the first Viscount Cowdray and his Liberal Party allegiance. They line a village at the foot of the chalk, three miles south of Midhurst on the A286, where the South Downs Way comes down off the ridge and crosses the road on Cocking Hill.
The centre of village life is The Blue Bell, which the village owns. It closed in 2016. Residents led by Peter Gibbon and Nico Dekker formed a Community Benefit Society, raised the money, bought the building for £470,000 in April 2019 and had it open again by December. The old pub sign turned up in a local garden and was restored. "We realised we could become just a collection of houses which is not what we want; it would have lost its community feel," said Philip Jackson, the sculptor who serves as the hub's president.
The kitchen does a Sunday roast that rotates through beef, lamb, pork, gammon or chicken, with a Vegan Wellington for anyone not eating meat. On Tuesdays the cooking is handed to food trucks — Woody's wood-fired pizzas one week, Hungry Harry's loaded burgers and dirty fries another. Dogs are welcome throughout, there is a garden looking towards the Downs, and three en-suite rooms. At the back, the Trollied Pantry sells everyday groceries alongside local honey, jams, cheeses and cooked meats, with bread and pastries baked on site to order. There are secure cycle racks, a repair station and a National Park information point, which tells you what kind of custom the pub expects.
The pub is popular with walkers. The Blue Bell sits just below the South Downs Way, and the walk from Cocking to Littleton Farm runs five or six miles along the ridge, climbing gently to Heyshott Down past Bronze Age burial mounds and cross-dykes before dropping down Littleton Down. Bus 60 links the village with Midhurst, Singleton, Lavant and Chichester, which makes the linear route walkable without a car. Costers Brook, one of Sussex's rare chalk streams, runs through gardens near the church.
The church is St Catherine of Siena, and it went without a saint's name until 2007. The dedication came from a 15th-century bell inscribed "Sancta Catrina"; in 2024 a copy of a portrait painted during Catherine's lifetime was brought from Siena for the Lady Chapel. The chancel arch is dated to about 1080, and on one wall a fragment of painting from around 1220 shows shepherds looking towards the Star of Bethlehem, an angel's arm raised above them with a palm branch. The building is never locked.
Cocking's older history is written down and cast in bronze. The Domesday surveyors recorded it as Cochinges, thirty-two households, five mills and a church, and valued the manor at fifteen pounds. Philip Jackson's History Column, worked with villagers, carries forty-eight low-relief panels that spiral from the Bronze Age to the Millennium. South of the village stood a chalk quarry and lime works whose kilns once supplied the sand-lime "White" bricks of Midhurst.
For a day out, the Weald & Downland Living Museum at Singleton lies down the same bus route, more than fifty rescued buildings across a thousand years of rural life. Midhurst and the fire-gutted Tudor ruins of Cowdray lie about three miles north. But the detail that stays with you is smaller. In the wall painting at St Catherine's, among the shepherds turned towards the star, their dog is looking up too.