Coldwaltham

Pub and weekly provisions

The Labouring Man stands twenty yards off the A29, the village's only pub and the place the parish treats as its meeting point. It has five en-suite rooms, an open fire and a patio garden for the summer. The food is home-cooked and the range is wider than the setting suggests: Welsh rarebit with homemade ale chutney, Parmesan and white-truffle arancini, a mushroom risotto with white truffle and Parmesan, grilled haddock with mash, tenderstem broccoli and a bacon-and-parsley sauce. There is also home-baked ham, egg and chips, beer-battered fish and chips, and sticky toffee pudding with rum-and-raisin ice cream to finish. Real ales are on.

For groceries you will need to plan. There is no permanent shop, but Sandham Memorial Village Hall runs a weekly coffee morning, with local produce for sale, and a post-office service.

A parish shaped by floodwater

The village sits about two and a half miles south of Pulborough in the Arun Valley, just north of the chalk of the South Downs. Coldwaltham is really three settlements — itself, Hardham and Watersfield — strung along roughly three miles of the A29 and adding up to about 420 households. The whole parish has been inside the South Downs National Park since 2012, and more than three-quarters of its eleven-mile boundary follows the rivers Arun and Rother.

Those rivers are the reason to come. East of the village lies Waltham Brooks, a 42-hectare reserve of floodplain that fills with resident and visiting birds. From Brook Lane a path runs around the reserve and along the Arun flood bank, mostly over stiles, with a spur that crosses the railway to Watersfield. You are asked to keep to the path, for the sake of nesting and wintering birds. Take the water seriously: this is tidal ground with deep, fast channels, unstable banks and winter flooding. Park considerately on the Brook Lane verge further west towards the railway bridge, without blocking gateways.

Two churches, layered centuries

St Giles' Church keeps its oldest fabric in the tower, built in the twelfth century and altered in the early thirteenth. Henry Woodyer rebuilt much of the rest in 1870 and 1871, and the short half-timbered belfry stage he added is unusual for the south-east of England. Inside there is a circular font bowl, probably twelfth-century, sitting on a Victorian base, along with Woodyer's carved reredos, pulpit and font cover and glass from the Hardman and Kempe workshops. The church historian John Allen judged that Woodyer's "restorations could be heavy-handed, but he had a compensating gift for the picturesque." At Hardham, the small church of St Botolph is known for its medieval wall paintings.

Road, posting station and canal

The Roman road Stane Street parts company with the A29 here, and a Roman posting station once stood at Hardham. Later the Arun Navigation drove a canal tunnel through, built in brick by James Edwards between 1787 and 1790. Its opening was marked with cannon fire, a public meal and a prize for the fastest barge through, carrying thirty tons of chalk; a section collapsed the same December. The 357-metre tunnel ceased use in 1889, the last barge passing with 26 tons of flint. At Watersfield the Old Crown House, seventeenth-century or older, was once an inn and is now two houses.

Reserves, museums and the journey home

Further afield the A29 takes you south to Arundel and its castle, while nearby an RSPB reserve, industrial museum and deer park offer alternative day-out choices. Pulborough, the practical railhead, is two and a half miles up the road; buses 69 and 71 pass through with limited service. End back in the village, where a pub fire suits a place this size.