The Star & Garter stands beside the duck pond, an 18th-century flint-and-brick free house with wooden floors, a log fire and rooms upstairs. Jim and Julie run it. The kitchen is more ambitious than the setting suggests: lamb porchetta with Lyonnaise potatoes and dhal purée, pan-fried salmon with a warm tartare sauce, pork-fat brioche with shredded ham hock and a quail egg, mushroom tacos, and a vegetarian Wellington among the Sunday roasts. If you want something simpler, the fish and chips comes with garden peas, tartare and a house pickle.
At the bar there is Goldmark Star Ale, a 3.8% session bitter, alongside two beers that change, usually from Bowman or Firebird, though in winter it drops to one. There is a large walled garden at the back, dogs are welcome, and most Sundays bring live music, with a quiz once a month. The pub was once called the Hurdlemaker's, a reminder of the village's former hurdle-making trade.
For anything you need to carry home, there is the Milk Hut at Ides Barn on Droke Lane, a vending machine selling the farm's own organic milk in reusable glass bottles, with self-service syrups if you want a milkshake. At weekends and in the school holidays Hannah and Frazer run a Coffee Hut alongside it. The Milk Hut is East Dean's main food-retail stop; West Dean Stores is in neighbouring West Dean.
The village is rich in flint buildings, with some surviving traces of its thatched vernacular, set in a fold of the chalk downs, cut by dry valleys. The River Lavant rises near here as a seasonal winterbourne, generally flowing in wetter periods, and threads on through Charlton, Singleton and West Dean before it reaches the walls of Chichester. Flint is the local grammar: the church is flint with stone dressings, the pub flint and brick.
That church is All Saints, a small cruciform building with a central tower, Grade I listed and older than it looks from the lane. The chancel, transepts and tower are 12th century, the nave 13th, with some 14th-century windows and a restoration in 1870. The font is the thing to find. It sits on an inverted late-12th-century scalloped capital, possibly carried here from Boxgrove Priory, and still carries the sawn-off staples that once locked a lid over the holy water, a precaution against its theft for witchcraft. A low window in the south chancel wall suggests an anchorite's cell once stood against it. Up in the tower are beams dated 1655 and three bells, one of them from about 1570 and inscribed HAL MARI FUL OF GRAS.
The walking is the reason many people come. From the Village Hall, the Three Villages Walk makes a seven-mile circuit through Charlton and Singleton and back over Levin Down and North Down, climbing to Goodwood's Counters Gate along the way, about three and a half hours with 288 metres of ascent and, for once, no stiles. The Monarch's Way passes through the village too, arriving over Trundle Hill within sight of Goodwood Racecourse, which sits immediately south-west along with the motor circuit, the aerodrome and the house. Singleton, in the next valley, holds the Weald & Downland Living Museum; West Dean has its Edwardian pergola and restored glasshouses.
The old story here concerns Garton Orme, lord of the manor, who sold up in 1752 and was said, according to tradition, to have got rid of his first wife by pushing her down a well. The later owners of neighbouring Lavington were said to spit whenever they crossed his boundary.
Chichester station is about eight miles off; by road you turn at Singleton off the A286. The village is served by on-demand 99 Flex; book up to 48 hours ahead. Turn up at the pond on a still morning and the loudest thing is usually the ducks.