The Church of the Good Shepherd measures about sixteen feet square and seats around twenty people. It has no electricity, so evening services are held by candlelight, and a white weatherboarded belfry rises above the trees around it. What stands today is only the chancel of a larger medieval church; the rest is gone, and the surviving fragment is reputed to be the smallest church in Sussex.
Inside are a restored twelfth-century square font, a late-twelfth-century piscina and a scatter of narrow lancet windows from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The building has a Grade I listing and a thirteenth-century core, though excavation showed the first church here began a century earlier and was enlarged in the fourteenth. Tradition says fire destroyed the larger church in Cromwellian times, but how and when it actually fell is not known. It was rededicated to the Good Shepherd in 2000, after centuries under an uncertain medieval saint who may have been St Zita.
British Sea Power wrote a song called "The Smallest Church in Sussex" about the place, and recorded its harmonium part on the instrument that sits inside.
The church is reached on foot from nearby stops or roads. From Alfriston it is about fifteen minutes: across the bridge over the Cuckmere and up over the hill, with the Litlington White Horse, the Rathfinny vineyards and St Andrew's church laid out below. On the larger Cuckmere circular walks the church is a short return detour, a kilometre or so through fields and a surfaced path under trees. The Cuckmere Pilgrim Path, a signed loop of twelve to fourteen miles from Alfriston, drops down past the church on its higher route above the Long Man of Wilmington.
The hamlet itself is barely there: the church and Old Rectory on a shoulder of the Downs, and Lullington Court, Court Farm and a few flint-and-brick houses at the foot of the hill, with the river and Alfriston below to the west.
For a pub, a shop or tea you cross to Litlington, the next settlement along. The Plough & Harrow is a seventeenth-century pub with a family-friendly beer garden, a dog menu and four regular Long Man cask ales — Long Blonde, Best Bitter, Rising Giant and Old Man — poured from the nearby Long Man Brewery, though not all four are always on. Long Man Brewery keeps a shop and tasting room in a restored flint building at Church Farm, selling beer by the bottle, cask or mini-cask. The Litlington Tea Gardens, made about a hundred and fifty years ago, are among the oldest tearooms in Sussex.
Lullington was busier once. Battle Abbey held it after the Conquest, and by 1360 it had replaced Alciston as the administrative centre for the abbey's Cuckmere estates. Fourteenth-century court rolls record wharves, eel traps and fisheries along the river, and a working village of a tanner, two butchers, a cobbler, a baker, an ale-taster and two women listed as common brewers. Most of the trades had drifted to Alfriston by the end of the century.
Dirk Bogarde spent childhood summers at the Old Rectory between 1931 and 1933 and later wrote about them in Great Meadow, named for the field between the church and Court Farm. Jeremy Hutchinson, the barrister who helped defend Penguin Books in the Lady Chatterley trial, took the title Lord Hutchinson of Lullington and owned the house with the actress Peggy Ashcroft.
The nearest railway is Berwick, and in summer the weekend 47 Rambler bus runs from there through Litlington to Lullington Corner, a short walk from the church. Around the hamlet the chalk heath of the former Lullington Heath reserve, now part of the enlarged Seven Sisters National Nature Reserve, is grazed by cattle and Exmoor ponies to keep the coarse grass down and let the wildflowers and orchids through.
On a still evening, with the candles lit and the harmonium going, a handful of people is enough to make it feel full.