The garden at the Eight Bells drops away toward Hayward's Bottom, with Folkington Hill rising beyond a gravel terrace and a scatter of shaded tables. The pub has traded on this site since 1670. It is a small free house, food-led, holding two AA Rosettes, and it names itself Best Sussex Pub for 2026.
The kitchen leans hard on local produce. You might find locally smoked trout with dill crème fraîche, pickled cucumber and mizuna; a spiced pulled-lamb, spinach and mint filo pie; roasted Sussex mackerel with salt-baked beetroot; stuffed Sussex pork belly; or, for anyone leaving the meat alone, a wild-mushroom and lentil puff pie or a spiced squash-and-kale Wellington. There are bar snacks, tasting menus, food for children, and barbecues on summer weekends. The Guardian called it a "thoughtfully renovated 350-year-old pub," and singled out that garden looking over the Downs.
Dogs are welcome inside and out, on leads and kept off the lawns. Harvey's is stocked, and local ales are poured, though the line changes. Beyond the barn and the terrace there is a seasonal outside bar.
This is a walkers' village. Polegate station, on the Southern line, sits about two and a half miles off; the Cuckmere Community Bus, route 41, calls at the Eight Bells and Church Lane on Tuesdays and Thursdays and links the village to Friston, East Dean and central Eastbourne. The road in is a minor one, running south from the A22 between Polegate and Friston.
The walking is the point. The Three Tapsell Gate Walk is a seven-mile downland-and-forest circuit from East Dean through Friston and Jevington, visiting three churches and passing within two hundred yards of the Eight Bells, which is close enough to plan the day around. Friston Forest gives a shorter loop from the village, about four and a half miles and a couple of hours' walking, and the pub sits a five-mile walk from Birling Gap along the coast.
Banoffi pie was worked out here. It was developed in 1971 at the Hungry Monk by head chef Ian Dowding and the restaurateur Nigel Mackenzie, who kept the creators' own spelling of the name. The Hungry Monk has since closed, but its building survives, an eighteenth-century flint restaurant with red-brick dressings joined to an early-nineteenth-century house called Monk's Rest.
St Andrew's stands on the walking circuit, small and built of flint and green sandstone. Its west tower is Saxon, or very early Norman, and the body of the church is mostly thirteenth-century, restored in 1873. Under the tower floor in 1785, Sir William Burrell found a carved relief read as Christ's Harrowing of Hell; it was reset at the west end of the nave, where it still is. The churchyard keeps a rare wooden tapsell gate. Inside, a marble monument shows Charles Rochester of Filching Manor being drawn toward the grave by his dead wife. Hartley Shawcross, the chief British prosecutor at Nuremberg, is buried here.
In 1086 the Domesday surveyors found twenty-three households, one mill worth eight shillings, and a place split between two lords and valued at four pounds fifteen shillings. Later the village turned to smuggling, and produced an innkeeper of several names remembered as Jevington Jigg; in 1788 armed constables came to the Eight Bells to make an arrest.
Walk out past the church in the evening and the valley goes quiet. The sea is not far off, and the pub garden fills up slowly behind you.