East Dean

The Tiger Inn on the green

The Tiger Inn sits on the green with low oak beams, stone floors and a log fire, and has been pouring drinks for residents, farmers, soldiers, walkers and smugglers since the fifteenth century. The regular cask ale is Long Man Best Bitter, brewed a few miles off, with Long Man Long Blonde, an Only With Love beer and St Austell Tribute passing through. The food is Sussex without much ceremony: Long Man-battered fish and chips, a slow-braised lamb shank, Prinkle Farm pork-and-herb sausages, a chicken, gammon and leek pie, and a Sussex Charmer ploughman's that comes with a ham-hock-and-pea terrine. Dogs are welcome, and there is garden seating to the front and side for the days the fire is not the point.

The green it faces is the centre of the old village. Flint cottages gather around it south of the A259, with the church at one edge and the newer Downlands Estate north of the road. The parish is large — roughly 760 households across three and a bit square miles — but the part you came to see is compact enough to explore on foot.

A compact village with food close by

Beside the green, Hiker's Rest is a family-run café where walkers can stop for coffee, cake, brunch or a light lunch. The café has indoor seating, a terrace and seating on the green. Also on the green, Red Elephant Siam serves Thai food.

Most people are here for the walking. A three-mile circular follows old drovers' and smuggling routes across grazed chalk grassland down to Birling Gap — an hour and a half, four short steep pitches, gates rather than stiles, dogs on leads. The parish keeps a longer 4.5-mile loop through Friston and the Seven Sisters, and a seven-mile Three Tapsell Gate Walk that ties together the churches at East Dean, Friston and Jevington. A nine-and-a-half-mile circuit takes in the Seven Sisters, Cuckmere Haven and Exceat before returning through Friston Forest. Birling Gap itself is about a mile across the fields; the direct road has no pavement, so the footpaths are the sensible way. At the bottom, fifty steps drop to a shingle beach with rock pools and fossils. Stay well back from cliff edges and bases: they can collapse without warning.

Inside St Simon and St Jude

The church of St Simon and St Jude is Grade I and older than it first looks. Its three-stage tower is Saxon or early Norman and its chancel transitional Norman; the nave has a Norman north wall and fourteenth-century south wall, the porch is fifteenth-century, and the west wall was rebuilt in 1885. It is flint, with a king-post roof, and the font holds a carved twelfth-century fragment turned up in 1887 while men were propping a nave tie-beam. At the back of the churchyard is a restored Tapsell gate, pivoted at its centre, one of only six left in Sussex.

Smugglers, writers and Sherlock Holmes

The parish carries its history lightly. Crowlink, a hamlet within it, was an eighteenth-century gin-smuggling haven that traded under the name Genuine Crowlink, and later became home to E. Nesbit, who wrote The Railway Children. Conan Doyle put Sherlock Holmes's retirement on the Downs at "a small farm upon the Downs, five miles from Eastbourne," and East Dean is a plausible but unproven candidate, with a blue plaque marking the claim on a house nobody can prove was the one.

Stations, coast buses and free tennis

Eastbourne station is about three miles east, Seaford five to the west, and the 12 and 12X buses run the coast road between them. On the recreation ground the tennis nets stay up all summer, free to anyone who turns up with a racket.