Crowlink

Flint Hamlet, Open Paths

Crowlink is a small hamlet formed around a farmstead, with flint cottages and open downland near the coast. Crowlink House is a timber-framed building from the seventeenth century or earlier, refronted in the eighteenth in flint with red-brick dressings and quoins. Crowlink Cottages form an eighteenth-century flint range with red-brick dressings and a partly tile-hung upper floor. Brick, flint and handmade clay tiles beneath hipped roofs define the older buildings. The National Trust's circular walk starts at Crowlink car park and heads towards Friston, Birling Gap and the chalk cliffs.

From Crowlink car park, reached off the A259 at Friston Pond, a circular route of four and a half miles loops out through field, woodland and coast paths, taking about three and a half hours at a moderate pace. It climbs and drops, crosses stiles and gates, and turns to mud in winter, so bring boots rather than trainers. The path runs through Friston churchyard, past the flower-rich Hobb's Eares meadow, down to Birling Gap and up over three of the Seven Sisters. A dew pond beside the track draws dragonflies and damselflies; the hillside building above it once housed Second World War pilots from the nearby airfield. The South Downs Way is a mile off, between Exceat and Eastbourne, and Exceat can be reached on foot through Friston Forest. Trains are at Seaford, five miles away, and Eastbourne, six; the 12 Coaster runs via Friston Pond and the 13X via Birling Gap.

Downland, Food and the Sea

The grassland is the point of the landscape. More than five hundred acres of open chalk downland here form one of the longest undeveloped stretches on the south coast, and in summer they carry salad burnet, gorse, skylarks, wheatears and butterflies.

A footpath detour from the Crowlink circular leads to the Tiger Inn at East Dean. The inn dates to the fifteenth century, with an open fire and low oak beams, and serves real ales alongside a menu that changes with the season: Long Man battered fish and chips, Prinkle Farm pork-and-herb sausages, a chicken, gammon and leek pie, slow-braised lamb shank, a Sussex Charmer ploughman's, a beetroot, red-pepper and quinoa burger. Down at Birling Gap the National Trust café does breakfast baps, homemade soup, sausage rolls, pasties and cream teas, and its shop stocks Auntie Val's marmalades and chutneys and a gin called Generation 11. The beach below is reached by fifty steps, and dogs on leads are allowed on the sand and in the café.

A Small Norman Church

The church stands at Friston, up the churchyard the walk passes through. St Mary the Virgin is Grade I and very small: a Norman nave with some Saxon work, a chancel of about 1300, and a tile-hung bell turret at the west end. A north transept was added in 1892 to hold two Selwyn-family monuments brought from Friston Place.

Smugglers and Coastguards

Crowlink's history is quieter than its geography suggests, and less respectable. In the eighteenth century it ran gin ashore, and the contraband landed here was sold under its own name, "Genuine Crowlink." Later it kept a coastguard station — three cottages for six men, first recorded in 1832. Erosion undermined it by the 1890s and the station closed in 1921; after the army occupied the site from 1939, the cottages are thought to have been destroyed by Canadian gunners using them for target practice.

E. Nesbit's Retreat

From 1911 the writer E. Nesbit, who wrote The Railway Children and helped found the Fabian Society, took a Crowlink farmhouse as a retreat. It is easy to see the appeal. You leave the car at the end of the lane, and the buildings are soon behind you, with grass, the cliff line and the sea ahead.