The village pub at Offham has been an inn since 1760, and its kitchen now turns out jerk chicken, sometimes cooked outside on the barbecue, alongside Sunday roasts and a rum-soaked lamb shank. The Blacksmiths Arms sits at the foot of the Downs and describes itself as a country inn with a Caribbean twist; that runs through to Jamaican-influenced vegetarian and vegan dishes as well as the usual pub classics. Inside are several small, basic dining areas rather than one large room, with a raised patio at the back. Harvey's Best is generally on, sometimes with Long Man Copper Hop beside it. Dogs are welcome, and a water bowl is kept ready.
You should not arrive expecting to buy anything else. Offham has lost its village shop, and what remains is a working forge that now makes artistic metalwork rather than shoeing horses. It is a small cluster of flint cottages, a church, the pub and the forge, and locals say the name as "Oafum".
The A275 runs straight through, carrying you south to Lewes in three miles or north to Cooksbridge, where hourly Southern trains between London and Eastbourne stop seven days a week. The 121 bus serves the village Monday to Saturday.
St Peter's is younger than it looks. It was begun in 1858 and consecrated in 1860, designed by Ewan Christian and paid for largely by the Shiffner family of Coombe House; Sir George Shiffner was rector here from 1863 to 1906. It is built of light pebble-flint, with a seven-sided apse, an axial tower carrying a pyramid spire, marble shafts and a large circular font. The stained glass came from several of the best Victorian workshops — Lavers and Barraud, Hardman, Capronnier, Kempe. One Capronnier window was lost to a storm in 1982.
The real curiosity is up on Offham Hill. In 1801 George Shiffner opened a quarry and lime works there and hired the engineer William Jessop the younger to link it to the River Ouse. By 1809 the result was a gravity tramway on paired tracks: loaded wagons ran down under their own weight while empty ones were hauled up as counterweights, and the chalk and lime were tipped into barges at Chalkpit Cut. John Murray, writing his travel handbook in 1858, called it "the remains of what claims to be the first bit of railway executed in the south of England." The paired brick tunnels that carried it under the road survive, twenty-two metres long on a fierce one-in-three-and-a-half slope, and were listed in 2013.
The same hill saw the Battle of Lewes in 1264, when Simon de Montfort defeated Henry III. Domesday valued the parent manor of Hamsey at ten pounds, down from twenty before the Conquest, with thirty households working the land.
The walking is the reason to stay. Trails climb from the water meadows to the chalk pit plateau, past Jill's Pond and up towards Black Cap and Mount Harry, which tops six hundred feet; a shorter two-mile circuit keeps to the heritage sites nearer the village. Families have the green and playground at Beechwood Hall, and Lewes three miles down the road adds a castle, Anne of Cleves House and the Pells, said to be the oldest documented freshwater outdoor pool in the country.
Come back down to the pub afterwards, where the smell of the Caribbean kitchen reaches you before the door does.