St Andrew's stands on its own on the north slope of Didling Hill, a short way from the handful of houses it serves, and it has no electricity. Inside there is a rough tub-shaped font, benches from the fifteenth century, and a pulpit and communion rails from the seventeenth, under rendered flint walls with lancet windows. The nave runs straight into the chancel with no arch or screen between them, a plan almost unchanged since Alan de St George is thought to have founded the church around 1220. It is still called the Shepherds' Church, close by the old drovers' track that crossed the downs.
It has not always been kept this carefully. A bishop who came in 1687 found it "soe ruinous that it is like to fall." It did not fall.
Didling itself is a very small group of houses north of the church, red-tiled farm buildings set among sheep pasture and chalk. Christopher Somerville, who walked through, called it "mellow, red-tiled Didling." North of here the land opens into wide pastoral lowland; to the south, woods and cornfields fall away toward a hazy line of sea.
Didling has no pub of its own, so for a drink you go to one of two places nearby. The Royal Oak at Hooksway is a sixteenth-century cottage down a lane signed off the B2141, with log fires and a large garden; David Jeffrey and Sarah Warner have run it since 1990. The cask ales are usually Langham Hip Hop and Arundel Castle, with a changing seasonal Langham, and dogs are welcome. Local lore holds that a sheep rustler named William "Shagger" Shepherd was shot here around 1680 after taking refuge, and is said not to have left.
The Elsted Inn, in a Victorian building at Elsted, does the more ambitious cooking. The kitchen turns out cured salmon with beetroot carpaccio, horseradish cream and dill oil; sweet-potato agnolotti with charred leeks, asparagus and sage cream; liver and bacon with bubble and squeak; and a buttermilk-chicken burger with cheese and barbecue sauce. It was under new management when last checked.
For meat, Midhurst is roughly three miles off in a straight line. Michael Courtney Butchers on North Street has been at it more than fifty years and sells meat boxes and pet food alongside the counter; Cowdray Farm Shop, out by the ruins, carries estate venison in season and grass-fed lamb and beef. Midhurst is also where you find the Market Square, historic Tudor buildings and the independent shops, with squash and badminton at the Grange Centre and a climbing wall at the college if the weather turns. Getting to any of it means minor downland lanes; Petersfield looks to be the nearest station, about six miles off as the crow flies, and public transport here is the on-demand Book-a-Bus, which needs booking ahead and has no fixed stop in the village itself — a separate scheduled bus calls at Lower Elsted.
Most people come to Didling to walk. Somerville's six-mile circuit starts at the Royal Oak and climbs a flinty track through yew and beech on Philliswood Down, joins the South Downs Way past the Devil's Jumps, then drops down Didling Hill to the church and crosses farmland to Treyford. The Devil's Jumps are a Bronze Age barrow cemetery on Treyford Hill: five bell barrows in a line running north-east to south-west, with two bowl barrows alongside. Four of the mounds were dug into in the late nineteenth century and found to hold cremations laid under layers of earth and flint. A shorter loop of 4.1 miles from the Elsted Inn takes in Manor Farm and the ruins of St Mary's at Treyford; a walk recorded in June found nettles and some indistinct path marking.
Didling was its own civil parish until 1933; the church had shared a benefice with Treyford since 1535. Walkers coming down off Didling Hill still finish at St Andrew's, lit by nothing more than its lancets and candles.