Old St Peter's stands by itself on a low mound in the Ouse meadows, ringed on one side by a loop of the river and on the other by the bed of a vanished railway. It has no heating and no electricity. The nave and most of the chancel are early twelfth century, the west tower fourteenth, the south porch fifteenth, and because the building escaped the wholesale Victorian scraping that tidied up so many parish churches, it still feels its age: Norman arches over the doors, a crown-post oak roof, an octagonal limestone font, and a stone altar cut with the names of the parish's First World War dead. In 2026 it opens at weekends, ten until four, though it is worth checking before you set out.
The reason it sits so far from anyone is that the village moved. Over the centuries the population shifted towards Offham, and a new St Peter's was consecrated there in 1860. The Rev. George Shiffner had made the case a decade earlier, calling the old church "most inconveniently placed, being so remote from the habitations of the people as to be inaccessible to the old & infirm." The old building was marked for demolition, then reprieved as a chapel of ease.
Hamsey is really a scatter of settlements — the hamlet itself, Cooksbridge, Old Cooksbridge, Offham and Bevern Bridge — spread across a parish that runs from the Ouse floodplain up to the chalk.
The Rainbow, at Old Cooksbridge, was built in 1749 and now runs a carvery alongside the bar, with a real fire and a garden. The kitchen does chicken, leek and gammon pie, beef and Guinness pie, Harvey's beer-battered catch of the day and a Thai red curry, and the Sunday carvery turns out beef, gammon and turkey. Harvey's Sussex Best is the regular ale, which is no surprise so near the brewery in Lewes.
The Blacksmiths Arms in Offham, built in 1760, is the more unusual of the two. Fitzroy Benjamin and his wife Birgit run it as a country pub with a Jamaican kitchen: dishes include reggae roast chicken, spicy chicken wings, Caribbean pepper steak, Jamaican beef stew and fried plantain, plus fish and chips for anyone who wants it. The interior is small and plain, there are guest rooms and a covered patio at the back, dogs are welcome, and Harvey's Sussex Best and Long Man Copper Hop were on the handpumps in May 2026.
For self-catering, Holmansbridge Farm Shop grew from an egg stall at the farm gate into a butcher, deli and greengrocer, with local game and venison and its own burgers, pies, Scotch eggs and sausages — including one made with Harvey's ale. Curry Cottage, in the former Chalk Pit Inn on Offham Road, does chicken tikka masala, a tandoori mixed grill and the Curry Cottage Mix, and delivers out to Cooksbridge.
Walkers can pick up the Cooksbridge Rail to Ramble circular straight from the station: 6.6 miles and about three and a half hours, climbing steeply to Black Cap and the beacon on Mount Harry before dropping through Offham's old chalk pits and back along the river. The chalk pits were a serious industrial site. An inclined tramway was cut here by 1809 to carry chalk down to the valley, and Historic England considers it probably the first railway in the south of England.
Cooksbridge station puts you on the line, Lewes is three miles south with its castle and museum, and Glyndebourne is close enough for an evening, subject to performance booking. The beacon on Mount Harry, once part of a chain of invasion warnings along the coast, now holds a brazier lit for the Golden Jubilee in 2002. From the churchyard below, on ground that sits almost exactly on the Greenwich Meridian, you can take in the whole arrangement at once: the flat meadows, the river, and the chalk rising behind Offham.