Firle

An Estate Village and Its Inn

The blacksmith's shop still stands in a workshop yard off The Street, alongside the saw pit, the carpenter's shop and the paint shop that once kept an estate village supplied. The buildings remain, largely unchanged. It lies in the foothills of the South Downs, about four miles east of Lewes and a kilometre south of the A27, with the chalk escarpment rising sharply behind it to Firle Beacon.

The Ram Inn anchors the place. It is the last of three pubs that once served the Lewes–Alfriston coach road, an eighteenth-century inn of flint and hung tile with three small rooms, each with an open fire, and a former stable and coach house now given over to eating and drinking. Until the nineteenth century it was the village courthouse. Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter, brewed in Lewes, is the regular ale, with guest beers alongside. Dogs are welcome, and the flint-walled garden sits beneath greengage trees. The kitchen works with Sussex produce. The Ram stayed in Mrs Mary Hufnet's family from 1908 into the 1980s.

Village Provisions and Middle Farm

For everyday needs there is Firle Stores and Post Office, which does real coffee, sandwiches, snacks and cold drinks as well as stamps.

A little way out, within the parish, Middle Farm is a bigger proposition: 625 acres, six generations, and a farm shop that runs from an additive-free butcher's counter to a cider barn holding more than a hundred draught ciders and perries with another two hundred in bottle. The cheeses are worth the detour on their own — Flower Marie, Sussex Yeoman, Wealdway, Gun Hill Smoked — and the bakery turns out scones, traybakes, pasties and sausage rolls daily. There is a tearoom, and an open farm with Highland cattle, alpacas, pigs, goats, donkeys and a Shire horse called Nellie, which makes it an easy half-day with children.

Church, Bloomsbury and the Gage Estate

The parish church, St Peter's, stands at the heart of the village and is Grade I listed, its chancel thirteenth century and the rest fourteenth. The north chapel belongs to the Gage family and holds their brasses and monuments, among them Bartholomew Bolney, who died in 1476. There is a John Piper window interpreting Blake's Tree of Life, a Kempe window, and chancel tiles thought to be by William Morris. In the churchyard lie Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Quentin Bell.

That connection runs deep here. Bell and Grant made their home and studio at Charleston, a mile and a half from the church, and it drew the Bloomsbury circle to this corner of Sussex for decades. Virginia Woolf came first, renting Little Talland House in the village for a year from January 1911. Firle Place, meanwhile, has been the Gage family seat for more than five centuries, a house of mixed Tudor and Georgian work hung with Van Dyck, Reynolds and Gainsborough, with a tearoom and terrace gardens open in season.

The Beacon and the Way In

Above all of it is the walking. The South Downs Way crosses the ridge and passes between the scheduled Bronze Age barrows on Firle Beacon, from where the view opens north over the Low Weald and south to the sea. A stile-free circuit of about five and a half miles takes you up and back. The village cricket club, founded in 1758, reckons itself among the ten oldest in the world.

Getting here is straightforward enough. Glynde station is a quarter-hour walk, on the line through Lewes; the Cuckmere Buses 25 runs on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays; and village parking is scarce, so the visitor car park or the one up on the Downs is the sensible choice.

Atlantic Colours on a Wet Afternoon

Woolf, settling in, wrote to a friend that she was staining the floors of her cottage "the colours of the Atlantic in a storm." The light off the Downs still does much the same thing to the village on a wet afternoon.