Milton Street

Farm-to-table above the valley

The nuggets at the Sussex Ox are made with ox shin and tail and come with walnut ketchup. That sets the tone for a pub that raises its own grass-fed South Downs cross lamb and pedigree Sussex cattle and cooks them farm-to-table. The building sits above the Cuckmere Valley on a country lane that runs down to the A27, with a separate bar and restaurant and a large rear garden looking out over the Downs. It is the only public food-and-drink business in Milton Street, which is a hamlet rather than a village.

The menu runs to a farm steak-and-ale pie with mash, greens and gravy, a lamb faggot with pease pudding, caramelised onions and jus, and a salt-beef sandwich stacked with Emmental, sauerkraut, gherkins, American mustard and fries, with a honey-roasted carrot and mushroom schnitzel among the vegetarian dishes. Long Man Best Bitter and Long Blonde are the regular local cask beers, with a changing guest and a local cider on handpump. Dogs are welcome throughout, there is a children's menu, and a real fire, popular with walkers. The building was once a butcher's shop, and a figure is said to appear on the landing — identified, depending on who is telling it, as the butcher or a smuggler.

From the pub door to the hillside giant

Many visitors come to walk. A circular route called Lots of Sheep's Wool and a Long Man / Deep Dean starts from the pub door and runs 6.8 miles in about three and a half hours, with a five-mile version for shorter legs. Field paths lead out towards the Long Man, Alfriston and the Rathfinny vineyards, and the staff will hand you a map. The Cuckmere Pilgrim Path, a church-to-church circuit, takes its gentler line through Milton Street between Wilmington and Alfriston.

The Long Man himself is a 72-metre figure cut into Windover Hill, free to visit and prominent from the surrounding Downs. He is younger than he looks — an investigation in 2003 pointed to the sixteenth or seventeenth century rather than prehistory — and during the Second World War he was painted green so aircraft could not use him to navigate. The Reverend A. A. Evans wrote that "the Giant keeps his secret and from his hillside flings out a perpetual challenge."

Fire, glass and an ancient yew

The parish church is at Wilmington, a short way along the valley. St Mary and St Peter is Grade I, its chancel twelfth-century, with a thirteenth-century chapel, a fourteenth-century nave, a fifteenth-century porch and an aisle rebuilt in 1883. A fire in 2002 destroyed the north transept, the organ and a window of bees and butterflies; the replacement glass takes a phoenix. In the churchyard stands a yew reckoned at 1,600 years old, with a girth of 23 feet, and a stone said to be Roman lying over the grave of the man who dug the vicarage well.

Rails, river and a radio fireball

Berwick station is a mile or two off, with Polegate about three miles east for step-free platforms and parking. Cuckmere Haven is about eight miles away, where the river reaches the sea at the only undeveloped estuary in the south-east and little egrets and lapwing work the mud. Milton Street once lent its name to a Goon Show episode, in which the sun catches fire above the hamlet and Neddie Seagoon is sent out to deal with it.