The garden of the Royal Oak has a welly wash by the gate, a heated drinks terrace, a barbecue area and a pirate ship for children to climb on. This is the pub at the foot of Devil's Dyke, and the equipment tells you what kind of afternoon most people have had before they reach it. It is an independent Sussex pub that dates to the 1880s, cooks with locally sourced ingredients, and welcomes what it calls furry friends on the way in.
The kitchen ranges wider than a village pub usually does. The May 2024 menu listed miso aubergine with rice and Asian slaw, sea bass with rice and ratatouille, an Asian-style duck salad, ploughman's lunches for meat-eaters and vegetarians, and fish and chips for anyone who wants the obvious thing. Local real ales are on the bar.
Up the road on Henfield Road is Rushfields, a farm shop, deli, butcher and pie kitchen with a café and plant centre attached. It opened in 2010 and was named Sussex Food & Drink Awards Food Shop of the Year in 2015 and again in 2021. The pies and sausage rolls are made on site by Colin, Zoe and Holly. You will find Poynings Grange lamb, the shop's own-flavour sausages, Sussex cheeses chosen by the head cheesemonger, Sam, and local drink down to Poynings Grange wine, Devil's Dyke Gin and beer from Harvey's and Long Man.
The village sits at the foot of the north-facing chalk scarp, tucked out of sight of the coast. Above it runs Devil's Dyke, a dry valley nearly a mile long that the National Park calls the longest, deepest and widest in the country. It was cut by meltwater just over ten thousand years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, and its slopes hold rare chalk grassland: in spring and summer you walk past orchids, wild thyme, horseshoe vetch and bird's-foot trefoil.
Two walks start more or less from the pub door. The Poynings village walk is a two-mile loop of about an hour that passes the line of the old funicular, Mill House and Holy Trinity church. The Devil's Dyke circular drops down a steep, sometimes slippery wooded bridleway into the village and climbs back up the dry valley to the South Downs Way. At the summit there is a second pub, the Devil's Dyke, with log fires, Sunday roasts and a garden that stands inside an Iron Age hillfort.
The summit was once a resort. At its Victorian and Edwardian peak it drew as many as thirty thousand visitors a day to a bandstand, an observatory, a camera obscura, a switchback and fairground rides. An aerial cableway of 1894, described as Britain's first, crossed three hundred metres of the valley, and a steep-grade railway built in 1897 carried people down to Poynings for a Sussex tea. The Brighton line that fed it all closed on the last day of 1938.
Holy Trinity, the flint church you pass on both walks, is a plain cruciform building of about 1370, put up by Thomas and Richard de Poynings under the will of their father Michael, who died the year before. Historic England calls it one of the finest village medieval churches in Sussex. Inside there is an octagonal font, a rough-carved seventeenth-century pulpit, fragments of medieval glass showing the Annunciation, and traces of a painted Saint Christopher surviving under later texts on the wall.
The place is old enough to be in Domesday, which counted thirty-five households, two mills and one church, and valued the whole manor at ten pounds. A later story attaches to the mills: when excise officers came looking, two brandy kegs were sunk in the lower millpond by letting water down from the upper one.
Hassocks station is about three and a half miles off, and the village road meets the A281 at Poynings Crossways, where the Stagecoach 17 between Brighton and Horsham calls — worth checking times before setting out.
Opposite the church, two seats mark Cora's Corner, in memory of Cora Littler, who lived at Downmere and died in 2004 aged 102. The seats are named Judy and Merrilee, for her two daughters.