Funtington

The Village Pub

The hunt used to meet outside the Fox & Hounds, hounds and all, until the traffic on the road through Funtington made it unsafe some time in the 1970s. The pub is still where the village gathers. The building is timber-framed and older than it looks under its rough plaster refacing, dating to the seventeenth century or before, with a hipped tiled roof, sash windows and three bay windows across the front. George Weston kept it until 1958, then Mr and Mrs Rowland took over.

Inside, a single opened-out bar runs around a central fireplace, with sofas by an open fire and a dining area at the back. The June menu ran from a caramelised onion and Saint Agur croquette and a smoked salmon and crayfish salad to beer-battered haddock in Arundel lager batter and roast pork belly with Yorkshire pudding, finishing on a Biscoff affogato. There is a front patio and a walled garden that fills up in summer, the cask beer includes three changing beers, usually local, and dogs are welcome at the bar and outside.

Farm Shops and Chalk Springs

The village lost its shop, Country Fare, in 2011, and planning consent followed in 2012 to convert the old stable block beside the pub into a replacement. What survives, and thrives, sits a little further out. Adsdean Farm Shop is a working family farm where the Hoare family has farmed for more than sixty years and run a butchery since 1970. The butchers are Sergey, Ben and Lawrence, and the counter carries own-reared beef and free-range pork alongside salt beef, pastrami, ox tongue, chorizo, salami, smoked chicken and air-dried smoked lamb, with venison and local game in season. It won a Sussex Food & Drink Award in 2008. On Common Road, Grange Farm Shop takes daily deliveries from local farmers and stocks fruit and vegetables, English cheeses, Sussex honey, frozen Sussex meat and locally baked bread.

Funtington takes its name from the people who lived beside the funta, the stream, and the parish is a landscape of chalk springs surfacing on the sheltered side of the Downs. The best walk starts at the Fox & Hounds itself: 2.2 miles up Downs Road to Kingley Vale. If you would rather skip the lane, the West Stoke car park puts you about fifteen minutes along an all-access path from the reserve entrance, after which the ground turns steep and uneven. Kingley Vale is one of western Europe's finest yew forests, with trees over five hundred years old, chalk grassland above, and the Bronze Age barrows known as the Devil's Humps on the ridge. A Neolithic flint mine, an Iron Age camp and a Second World War observation hide all sit within the same walk. Dogs must stay on leads throughout, for the wildlife and the grazing livestock, and mobile reception up there is poor.

St Mary's Through the Centuries

St Mary's has stood in some form since the thirteenth century, its flint walls and tiled roof holding a medieval north arcade and a fifteenth-century tower through an extensive Victorian rebuilding in 1859. The font is richly carved and attributed to Benjamin Ferrey; there is an engraved memorial window by Simon Whistler. Sir Stephen Glynne, visiting in 1871, thought the result "far too large and pretentious for a village church." The churchyard holds Admiral of the Fleet Sir Provo Wallis, who was entered on the naval roll by his parents at the age of four and died at a hundred at Funtington House in 1892, and Colonel "Pat" Porteous, who won a Victoria Cross. Jessie Sparkes, buried here, reached a hundred and eight.

Getting to Funtington

The Fox & Hounds sits on the B2146, and the Stagecoach 54 stops there on its run between Chichester and Petersfield, though the timetable is thin; Bosham is the nearest railway station. Chichester, with its cathedral, and Goodwood are both within reach.

Ancient Yews and Wartime Scars

Before D-Day, Kingley Vale was used for live-fire training, and some of its old yews still carry the shrapnel. You can walk up among trees at least five hundred years old on a quiet afternoon, the sound closing off, the light coming down through the branches.