Coombes

Farm Food, Floodplain and Flowers

The farm at Coombes sells its meat from a vending machine. Beef, lamb and pork raised on the surrounding fields, frozen and stacked in a cabinet at Church Farm, with eggs and local honey on an honesty table beside it. It's entirely self-service.

Coombes is a farm-and-church hamlet on the west side of the Adur valley. The Passmore family has worked the land for five generations, since 1901. Their thousand acres run from chalk downland down to the river, and about 140 of those acres sit roughly two metres below high tide, so the low ground has to be drained to stay farmable. The fields grow bread wheat, barley, lucerne and winter rape; a bank of downland left to itself carries more than two hundred species of flower.

Fishing Lakes and a Church Without a Saint

Down by the water is Passies Pond, three fishing lakes with 150 pegs between them, the main lake holding carp reported to thirty-five pounds. The pond was dug because Trevor Passmore, known as Passie, liked to fish, and it still carries his nickname. There is a small café and tackle shop at the lakeside — tea, coffee, hot chocolate, and some hot food if the kitchen is running that day. Dogs are not allowed at the lakes, and children need an adult with them.

The church stands alone on the hillside above the farm, and its dedication is genuinely lost; no one now knows which saint it was built for. The flint nave is late-eleventh-century, the chancel rebuilt in the early fourteenth. At some point before 1724 the west tower and part of the church fell down, and the nave was shortened to what remains. Inside hangs a single bell that may date to around 1100 and may have been cast in Normandy, and which the farm believes could be the oldest in Sussex.

Paintings Beneath the Plaster

What brings people up the hill are the paintings. Uncovered in 1949 beneath later plaster, they belong to the early twelfth century and the so-called Lewes Group. You can make out Christ's feet in a mandorla, the lion of St Mark, Christ handing the keys to St Peter and a book to St Paul, a Flight into Egypt, and above the chancel arch a straining, Atlas-like figure who appears to be holding up the wall.

Coombes is old in the records too. The Domesday survey of 1086 counted thirty-three households — twenty-seven villagers, four smallholders and two slaves — with woodland assessed at four pigs and a church. The place was worth twelve pounds before the Conquest, fell to ten, and had recovered to thirteen by 1086. There was a salt-house bringing in fifty shillings and fivepence; the mounds left by that medieval salt-working still show as cropmarks in the fields west of the river.

Downland, the Adur and a Bramber Meal

For walking, the marked route from Lancing Ring car park loops through Coombes Farm and back over Steep Down, two to three hours with some steep ground and stiles, and it passes the church on the way. The riverside footpaths along the Adur run north towards Bramber and the South Downs Way, across chalk grassland and arable farmland with the broad Downs views that come with them.

For a proper meal, head to the Castle Inn in Bramber, a few miles north, which does fish and chips, pan-roasted trout, a chargrilled Sussex lamb Barnsley chop and Sunday roasts, and keeps water bowls and treats for dogs. Getting here means the lane off the A27 at the Lancing College turning; the nearest station is Lancing, and the hamlet itself isn't on a bus route, so check timetables before you rely on one.

Lambing and the Maize Maze

In late summer the farm cuts a maze into the maize and opens the field, and in spring there is lambing. The dates move every year, so you ask when you arrive.