Glynde

A Village Local Reborn

The Trevor Arms brews its own best bitter, the first beer made in Glynde for nearly two hundred years, and pours it right next to the station. The pub sits directly beside Glynde station, handy for a walker coming off the Lewes train. It reopened in 2025 after eight years dark, run now by Steve and Bethany with a kitchen under chef Matt. The bitter is one of twenty changing taps, and the names on the list lean local: Burning Sky, Beak, Abyss.

The food shifts with the season, but recent plates have run to dripping-battered gherkins, fish and chips, steak pie, seared mackerel and curried cauliflower fritters, with a lemon-drizzle blondie and rhubarb to finish. Steve is coeliac, and the pub takes gluten-free and vegan cooking as a matter of course rather than an afterthought. Old farm tools and work by local artists hang on the walls, and the calendar fills up with folk sessions, apple pressing, knitting and drawing groups. John Harvey built the place for the coming of the railway, and it has stood here about a hundred and eighty years.

Tea, Flint and Elegant Simplicity

Up on Ranscombe Lane, Glynde Stores does the work of three buildings: the village shop, the Post Office and the Little Cottage Tea Room. The tearoom serves light lunches, homemade scones and cakes, and a full afternoon tea of finger sandwiches, scones, clotted cream and jam; dogs are welcome in the garden. The shop probably had a shop attached by 1815, kept by five generations of the Lusted family until Bob Lusted, the last of them behind the Post Office counter, retired in 1978.

St Mary the Virgin was built between 1763 and 1765 by John Morris of Lewes, to a design by Sir Thomas Robinson, for Richard Trevor, Bishop of Durham. The result is Palladian: a finely knapped-flint west front, a stone porch and pediment carrying the bishop's arms, an open stone belfry and a Venetian east window. Inside are box pews, a screen, a scalloped white-marble font of 1765, Flemish glass reset by C. E. Kempe and a west gallery of 1841. The historian Thomas Walker Horsfield called it "elegant simplicity".

Caburn, Glynde Place and Opera

Behind the village rises Mount Caburn, a chalk outlier of the Downs crowned by the best-preserved Bronze Age hillfort in Sussex. You can reach it on foot by the public footpath starting opposite the village shop or the licensed path starting opposite the entrance to Glynde Place. The slopes carry burnt-tip and pyramidal orchids, Adonis and chalkhill-blue butterflies, skylarks overhead and, if you are lucky, peregrines. The full circuit from the station over the downland to Lewes and back is six and a half miles, hilly and stiled, passing dew ponds, an old quarry and long views across the Ouse valley before returning through the village. John Ellman became tenant of the Great Farm at Glynde in 1780 and helped improve the Southdown breed of sheep.

Glynde Place stands at the top of the village, an Elizabethan house of 1568–69 raised for William and Anne Morley from local flint, chalk and Caen stone, and receiving visitors on selected dates. Just beyond it is Glyndebourne, where John Christie and the soprano Audrey Mildmay founded their opera festival in 1934. Christie wanted "not just the best we can do but the best that can be done anywhere," and the house he began now seats 1,250.

Arriving by Rail and Road

Glynde station is one stop and about five minutes from Lewes, on the line between Brighton and Eastbourne, with the A27 close by for anyone driving. Bus services are limited.

The Summer Pool

The village swimming pool was given to the village in 1904 by Thomas Seymour Brand. It is unheated and unsupervised, operates in summer, and is for members or guests accompanied by a member.