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.
Beside the green, Hiker's Rest is the tearoom walkers aim for at either end of the day. It is family-run, does homemade cakes and freshly made lunches, will make up a picnic to take onto the hill, and sells local beer and wine alongside the tea. You can sit indoors, on the terrace, or out on the green itself. Opposite, Thai Terre cooks with South Downs produce: crispy salmon in a sweet red curry, massaman lamb, a Weeping Tiger sirloin with herb-and-tamarind sauce, Thai curry fish cakes, crispy duck leg with Thai herbs, and pad Thai.
Most people are here for the walking, and the Tiger Inn is where it starts. A National Trust circular of three miles leaves from its door, following 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, below cliffs the National Trust asks you to keep well clear of, since they come down without warning.
The church of St Simon and St Jude is Grade I and older than it first looks. The three-stage tower is Saxon or early Norman, the chancel transitional Norman, and the walls run through every century after; the porch is fifteenth-century, the west wall 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.
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.
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.