Lavant

Chalk Stream and Country Inn

The River Lavant is a chalk stream, one of the rare ones, and it runs the length of a village that is really three villages. East Lavant sits around its church and green; Mid Lavant strings out along the A286; West Lavant gathers itself around a Georgian farm and a big house. They ran as separate places for centuries and only joined for civil purposes in 1872. In winter the groundwater rises and the stream swells, which is why residents trained as citizen scientists now monitor water quality and riverflies at three sites.

Start at the Royal Oak on Pook Lane in East Lavant, a country inn with rooms and roughly two hundred years behind it. The kitchen leans on named suppliers — Walter Rose butchers, Kingfisher of Brixham, Hobbs House bakery — and the menu changes with what is in. You might find beer-battered fish and chips with minted peas and tartare, or the Royal Oak burger with smoked Cheddar, Dijon mayonnaise, barbecue relish and skin-on fries, alongside a field-to-fork Sunday roast. There is a log fire, a spacious garden, and water bowls and treats for dogs. The cask ales are Butcombe Original and Adam Henson's Rare Breed.

Blake's View and a Converted-Barn Tea Room

The Earl of March stands at the foot of the Downs on the Chichester–Midhurst road, an early-eighteenth-century building that was once a coaching inn. Its kitchen, under chef Adam Hadwen, works with local and foraged ingredients and looks out over rolling hills. Parish tradition holds that William Blake wrote the words later set as "Jerusalem" while taking in this view in 1803. He had reason to be nearby: he taught the children at Lavant House drawing, the house built around 1720 and later a girls' school until 2016.

For daytime there is Wellies, a tea room in a converted barn at Oldwick Farm in West Lavant, doing breakfast, lunch and a proper afternoon tea. The village shop closed in the mid-1990s, so stock up in Chichester, a little over two miles south.

Paths into the Downs

Most people come here to walk. The Centurion Way, five and a half miles of tarmac and compacted stone on a dismantled railway, links Chichester through Lavant to West Dean, and is scattered with commissioned sculpture: an amphitheatre cut from an old quarry and sown as a wildflower meadow, and above it David Kemp's Chichester Road Gang, figures welded from old gas canisters. The Lavant Valley circuit follows the Way for eight and a half kilometres and its outward leg is level enough for a buggy. For a climb, the seven-kilometre Trundle route rises from the valley to broad views over West Sussex.

Two Medieval Churches

St Mary's in East Lavant is Grade I, its nave twelfth-century, its tower encased in red brick by William Westbrooke in 1671. Inside are a 12th-century west doorway with zigzag moulding and five chancel stalls with misericords. St Nicholas' in Mid Lavant is a modest church and holds the monument of Lady Mary May; in 1835 a parishioner, Henrietta Dorrien, wrote that it was "so small that not only the body & gallery are completely fill'd but the Chancel cram'd." Domesday valued East Lavant at eighteen pounds a year, its mill at six shillings.

The Village Green

The green still has a cricket wicket at its centre, kept for the village club. You are asked, when you cross it, to keep off the prepared strip.