Patching

Pub Fires and a One-Street Village

The World's End keeps its log fires going and asks you to mention the dog when you book, so a suitable table can be set aside. It was the Horse & Groom until the A27 was extended, and the secluded garden is given over to families. The kitchen runs to pub classics and a Sunday roast of aged beef with Yorkshire puddings, roast potatoes and gravy made in the house. Badger Tanglefoot is the regular cask ale, with one other Badger beer that changes.

Patching is essentially one street. Seventeenth-century timber-framed houses stand among later ones, and the lanes climb north out of the village towards Patching Hill through fields and woodland. The whole place sits inside the South Downs National Park.

The Woodland Loop and Flint Church

The obvious circuit is the Patching Circular Loop, 4.2 miles from the World's End through the village, past the church and into the beech woods of the Angmering Park Estate. A short stretch early on turns to mud in winter. Coldharbour Lane, which runs east to Clapham, was once Deadman's Lane, and the tracks beyond Patching Hill carry on towards Storrington.

St John the Divine is the flint church at the northern edge of the village, thirteenth-century, with Perpendicular windows and a tower set at the north-east corner of the nave rather than the west end. Henry Woodyer restored it in 1888 and added the tall broach spire, the vestry and the south porch. Historic England calls it a "good small medieval flint church, rather much restored." Inside, the tiled reredos resembles the Morris & Co work at nearby Clapham and Findon.

Deep Time and Michelgrove

The Domesday surveyors counted forty-three households here in 1086 and valued the manor at fifteen pounds. Older still are the flint workings on the chalk above the village, thought to date from about 2500 to 1000 BC. In 1997 a metal detectorist working the fields south-west of Patching turned up fifty late-Roman coins, two heavy gold rings and fifty-four pieces of scrap silver; the latest coins were struck between AD 461 and 470.

A short way off, a castellated wall and an octagonal turret are all that remain of Michelgrove, the Shelley family's seat from the late fifteenth century until 1800, before the Duke of Norfolk bought the estate in 1828 and later had it demolished.

Routes In and Gardens Beyond

Getting here is straightforward. Angmering station is about two and a half miles away, with taxis and parking. The old A27 through the parish became Arundel Road after the 1995 bypass, and the A280 runs north over Long Furlong towards the Downs.

For a longer day out, Highdown Gardens sits free to enter on the chalk hill to the south-east, a former quarry planted by Sir Frederick and Lady Sybil Stern and now grown into a glasshouse, visitor centre and sensory garden. Arundel Castle and its thirty-eight acres of gardens are nearby.

The Hamlet Called France

One of the outlying hamlets is called France. Nobody is quite sure why: either because it stood apart from everything around it, or because a camp for Napoleonic prisoners of war once stood nearby. The parish council offers both and settles on neither.