North Marden

The Church at the End of the Lane

You reach the church at North Marden through a farmyard. There is no real village to walk through first: North Marden is a scatter of four houses and cottages on high, open downland, the kind of place you could drive past without registering that you had arrived. Sussex Parish Churches calls it "the remotest of the Mardens, indeed perhaps in the remotest area of the Sussex Downland," and standing in the farmyard, with the chalk rising on every side, that is easy to believe.

The church itself is small, twelfth-century and built of flint, and its nave and apsidal chancel form a single undivided cell — one of only three apsidal-ended churches in Sussex, and the only one with an apse and no chancel arch. The south doorway, dated to around 1130–40, retains its zigzag carving and was little touched by the Victorian restoration. The cylindrical font is probably twelfth-century too, with a lead lining folded over its rim. There is no electricity, which tells you most of what you need to know about the pace of things here.

Walking Out, Eating Nearby

Most of a stay is spent walking. The circuit that links North Marden with East Marden and Up Marden runs about seven miles and takes roughly four hours, threading three old downland churches through pasture, ridge and the steep-sided hanger woods. In spring the thick wooded hedges — known locally as shaws or rews — fill with wild garlic, bluebells and yellow archangel, and the return leg opens out towards the Trundle and Goodwood Racecourse. For a longer day, the eighteen-mile Octagon Way circles the whole parish and can be split here, one arm heading through Up Marden, Compton and Forestside to Rowlands Castle, the other through East Marden, Stoughton, Racton and Stansted.

For food and drink you go to the neighbouring villages. The Hare & Hounds at Stoughton is an eighteenth-century flint pub with stone-flagged floors, open fires and a separate public bar and dining room; the beer is well kept, with Flower Pots Perridge Pale, Long Man Best Bitter and Otter Amber among the regulars, and dogs are welcome in the rear garden. Darcy's Tea Room at Compton is a family-run tearoom and small grocery doing homemade cakes and cookies, cooked breakfasts and afternoon tea, and it is happy to see dogs and children. At Adsdean Farm shop near Funtington, trading since 1970, the butchers Sergey, Ben and Lawrence hang their own beef for three or four weeks and turn out salt beef, pastrami, ox tongue, chorizo and a Scandinavian-style air-dried smoked lamb.

Reaching North Marden

A car is the simplest way in, though the on-demand Book-a-Bus 96 Flex service covers this corner of the county — check pickup coverage before you travel. Chichester is about eight miles to the south-east, the nearest station is Rowlands Castle some six miles off, and the lanes are narrow; the B2141 that the walking route crosses wants care.

Ancient Yews, Gardens and Living History

Kingley Vale, reached from the quiet Stoughton car park, holds one of the great ancient yew forests, chalk grassland and thirty-nine recorded butterfly species. West Dean Gardens has Victorian glasshouses and an orchard of more than a hundred apple varieties, and the Weald & Downland Living Museum at Singleton fills a rain-threatened day with rescued historic buildings.

The Boundary-Hill Hamlet

The name comes from the Old English for "boundary-hill," and it may once have marked the western edge of South Saxon land. Banks and mounds north and west of the church may mark a deserted medieval settlement. The population was twenty-six in 1674 and twenty in 1971. It is not a place to seek crowds.