Easebourne

Yellow Doors and the Village Pub

The doors are yellow, and so are the window frames. It is a distinctive yellow the Cowdray Estate paints on the houses it owns, so that walking through Easebourne you can read at a glance which cottages belong to the estate and which do not. The buildings are local sandstone under clay-tile roofs, and the village runs north out of Midhurst, which adjoins it closely.

The White Horse sits on the edge of the estate in a former coaching inn of about three hundred years. Inside there are low beams, a wood-burning stove and a central partition that keeps some corners private; there is a cellar bar at the back and a patio at the side, with a wood burner out there too. Greene King IPA is the regular cask bitter, with Abbot, St Austell Tribute and Timothy Taylor Landlord passing through. The kitchen does salt-and-pepper baby squid, gin-and-dill-cured salmon, a White Horse burger with Monterey Jack and smoked-bacon chutney, slow-cooked lamb shank with dauphinoise, sweet-potato gnocchi with cauliflower and mushroom sauce, and beef-brisket ragù with pappardelle. Dogs are welcome, there are darts and boules, and live music turns up on some summer evenings.

The Cowdray Larder and Henley Dining

For provisions there is the Cowdray Farm Shop and Café at Cowdray Park. The butchery sells estate-stalked venison and estate-reared grass-fed lamb and beef, and the café menu leans on the same larder: harissa-roasted Cowdray lamb shoulder on flatbread, a Cowdray cheeseburger, steak frites, a sausage roll with piccalilli, and gelato made with milk from the estate herd.

Two miles north, at Henley, the Duke of Cumberland Arms is worth the short drive. The front rooms have red quarry tiles, boarded walls, matchboard counters and a log fire, with a dining extension added behind; the gardens run to more than three acres of terraces, a timber pavilion and a pond stocked with trout that end up in the kitchen. Simon Goodman, the owner and head chef, buys meat from nearby organic farms, fish from the south coast and vegetables from the pub's own patch. The board might carry honey-roasted ham with Hallgate Farm duck eggs and Buddington Farm chips, wild-boar-and-apple sausages, cod with pancetta and broad beans in a Langham Hip Hop beer sauce, or confit pork belly with creamed cabbage and apple glaze. Harvey's Sussex Best and Langham Hip Hop are the regular ales, drawn from casks behind the counter.

Walking the Rother Valley

Walking is the reason many people come. A short loop from Midhurst's North Street crosses the causeway to the Cowdray Ruins, follows the river and climbs through woodland to the traces of an Iron Age fort and a Norman castle on St Ann's Hill. A longer circuit of ten or eleven miles takes in the medieval Woolbeding Bridge, the River Rother and pasture that may hold Herdwick sheep, Sussex cattle or Belted Galloways before returning past the ruins. On the estate you can find Benbow Pond and an oak the estate reckons is somewhere between 850 and 1,000 years old.

Tudor Ruins and St Mary's

The ruins are the great fact of the place. Cowdray House was begun around 1520 and finished by 1542, a Tudor mansion with castle features that drew visits from Henry VIII and Elizabeth I; in September 1793 a fire during pre-wedding repairs gutted most of it and left only the Kitchen Tower standing. The name comes from the French for hazel-wood. Nearby, the Church of St Mary has a twelfth-century tower and fabric, with Historic England identifying an eleventh-century south aisle; its nave was once divided so that Augustinian canonesses had the east end and the parish the west, until the wall came down in 1876.

Arriving in Easebourne

Haslemere and Chichester are the practical stations, about fifteen and twenty-five minutes by car; the A272 and A286 cross in the parish. "I love driving into Easebourne from Petworth, seeing Cowdray ruins across the fields, then as you enter Easebourne the sight of the old bridge," one resident wrote. The bridge is still there, and so are the yellow doors beyond it.