Houghton

The pub at the village centre

The George & Dragon sits on the B2139 with a flint-infilled timber frame that dates to the seventeenth century, and possibly a good deal earlier. It is at the centre of eating and drinking in the village, and it carries the load. Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter is the regular cask beer, with Langham and Ringwood among the guests that come and go. The kitchen keeps to familiar ground: fish and chips in a batter made in-house, Hunter's chicken, gammon steak, Whitby scampi and chips, and a vegetable chilli for anyone skipping the meat. There is a real fire, a beer garden, board games on the shelf, high chairs for small children, and dogs are welcome.

A plaque inside records that Charles II stopped for a drink here on 4 October 1651, on the run after the Battle of Worcester. The story is treasured locally and told as legend rather than fact, which is the honest way to hold it. What the records do confirm is quieter and more human: the Cunningham family ran the inn for half a century, Robert as innkeeper into the 1870s and his son Charles until 1911, after which Harry Viney and his son Cyril took it on.

Chalk slopes, flint walls

Beyond the pub, Houghton is a short linear village pressed between wooded chalk slopes and the flat water meadows of the Arun. The church, the pub and the river crossing sit in a line along the road.

St Nicholas, the parish church, is medieval in origin but was more or less rebuilt in 1856-57 by G. M. Hills, who kept the simple aisleless plan of nave and chancel with a south porch and a bellcote at the west end. The oldest flint walling survives in the chancel, and the weathered lancets and the triple window at the east were reset from the original building. Inside there is a brass to Thomas and Anna Cheyne, who died in 1486, a heavy octagonal font of the later sixteenth or seventeenth century, and pitch-pine fittings from the Victorian restoration. The churchyard keeps some good eighteenth-century tombstones.

Five arches over the Arun

Walk east and you reach Houghton Bridge, built in 1875 in the older manner, its ashlar arches carrying the road across the Arun where the river splits around an island: four low elliptical spans on the western branch, a single one on the eastern. Strictly speaking the bridge stands in Amberley parish, a point worth knowing only if you are trying to say exactly where you are.

Paths through the Arun gap

The bridge is also the starting point for the walking, and there is a great deal of it. The South Downs Way crosses here at the Arun gap; follow it toward Washington and you have six or seven miles of moderate going past Amberley Castle, old chalk pits, gliders overhead and the earthworks of Rackham Banks. Below the village spreads Amberley Wild Brooks, a wetland of nineteenth-century ditches and wet grassland that holds more than half of Britain's aquatic plant species and, in a flooded winter, shoveler, pintail, wigeon and teal. The Wey South Path across it can be boggy almost year-round; the finest view is from the Downs above, looking out, as the national park describes it, over "far reaching views of the low weald, and the winding River Arun from the top of Amberley Mount."

Arrive by rail, linger at the museum

Amberley station is a short walk from the pub, and Compass buses run from here too — route 69 toward Arundel, route 71 toward Chichester, both calling at Pulborough along the way — though the rural timetable rewards checking before you set out. Just across the bridge, Amberley Museum fills a former chalk quarry with narrow-gauge trains, old buses and working craftsmen, which is where the children end up while everyone else is looking at the water.