Beneath Devil's Dyke
Poynings
A small downland village where chalk-valley walks, medieval stone and good local food meet below the South Downs scarp.
- Best for
- Downland walks, village history and local food
- Give it
- A relaxed half day, or longer with a summit walk
- Don't miss
- The dry valley and Iron Age hillfort at Devil's Dyke
Photo: AndyScott · CC BY-SA 4.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
A village made for walking into the Downs
Poynings puts a medieval church, an independent pub and local produce beneath one of the South Downs' defining chalk valleys.
Come for a compact village visit, then choose how far to range: follow the local loop past the old funicular line, climb into Devil's Dyke, cycle the disused railway trail or continue across the downland to Saddlescombe Farm. The Royal Oak and Rushfields give the day strong food stops without turning the village into a mere launch point.
Where to go
Places in Poynings
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 placesRushfields Farm Shop
A farm shop, delicatessen, butcher, pie kitchen, café and plant centre, with on-site baking and a strong selection of Sussex meat, cheese and drink.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- on Henfield Road
Poynings Village Walk
A council-published village loop passing the former Zion Chapel, the old funicular line, Mill House, Holy Trinity, Manor Farm and Newtimber Hill.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 60 minutes
- Locality
- starting at the Royal Oak
Saddlescombe Farm
A farmstead with more than a thousand years of history, a Knights Templar connection, a café and a surviving donkey wheel once used to raise water from a deep well.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 75 minutes
- Locality
- on the downland paths from Devil's Dyke
Food & drink
2 placesRoyal Oak
An independent Sussex pub serving locally sourced food, with local real ales and a large garden that includes a heated terrace, welly wash and pirate-ship play area.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- at the foot of Devil's Dyke
The Devil's Dyke
A summit country pub with views, log fires, gardens, cask ales and seasonal pub food, standing within the scheduled Devil's Dyke hillfort.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 90 minutes
- Locality
- at the Devil's Dyke summit
Walks & outdoors
1 placeDevil's Dyke
A nearly mile-long dry valley formed by Ice Age meltwater, with rare chalk grassland, broad Low Weald views and a scheduled Iron Age hillfort at the summit.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 120 minutes
- Locality
- above Poynings on the South Downs
History & heritage
1 place
Holy Trinity Church
A Grade I cruciform church built around 1370, with medieval glass fragments, an octagonal font, an early-17th-century pulpit and traces of a painted Saint Christopher.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 45 minutes
- Locality
- in the historic village
Things to do
1 placeDevil's Dyke Railway Trail
A family-friendly paved cycle trail on gentle slopes, following the disused railway route for about four miles as part of National Cycle Network route 20.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around 120 minutes
- Locality
- between Hangleton and Devil's Dyke
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Three ways to explore Poynings
Signature outings
Enter the great dry valley
Follow Devil's Dyke through rare chalk grassland beneath the ramparts of its Iron Age hillfort.
Find medieval Poynings
Explore Holy Trinity's cruciform plan, medieval glass and surviving traces of a painted Saint Christopher.
Finish at the Royal Oak
Pause for locally sourced pub food and local real ale beside the Royal Oak's walker-friendly garden.
The village story
Poynings Village Guide
From pub-garden details and local produce to chalk grassland, Victorian spectacle and medieval stone, Poynings rewards the climb from village floor to summit.
The Royal Oak at the foot of the Downs
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.
Local provisions beneath the chalk scarp
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.
Walking into Devil's Dyke's past
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.
Medieval stone and older village stories
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.
Arriving and remembering
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.
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A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
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Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- Royal Oak — royaloakpoynings.pub operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Rushfields Farm Shop — rushfields.com operator, sector body or destination organisation record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Holy Trinity Church — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Poynings Village Walk — midsussex.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- Devil's Dyke — southdowns.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- The Devil's Dyke — vintageinn.co.uk other published source record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Saddlescombe Farm — nationaltrust.org.uk national body or asset manager
- Devil's Dyke Railway Trail — nationaltrust.org.uk national body or asset manager