The gate into the churchyard pivots on a post at its centre rather than swinging on a hinge, and worked into it is a shepherd's crook forged in the village. It is a Tapsel gate, and the crook is a Pyecombe Hook, a pattern once used by shepherds across the Downs. The forge that made them is now a private house. Tools from the Berry, Mitchell and Black families, three successive lines of Pyecombe smiths, are kept at the Weald & Downland Living Museum.
Behind the gate stands the Church of the Transfiguration, a small flint building with a 12th-century nave and chancel and a tower added in the 13th. Historic England's list description calls it an "attractive small medieval building." Inside is a lead font from about 1170, banded with ornament and trefoil leaves.
Pyecombe sits in the Clayton Gap, where the A273 crosses the A23 and the South Downs Way comes over the road.
The Plough is on London Road, a free house the same family has run for more than twenty years. The kitchen leans Italian: diners have recently ordered chicken Milanese with spaghetti, a Mexicana pizza, goat's-cheese toasted salad, sweet-potato curry served in tortilla baskets, and homemade tiramisu. The restaurant is large and light, there is a spacious garden and a front patio where dogs off the hill are welcome, and the parking is free. The building was a Victorian coaching stage, and villagers say that during the Second World War it was pressed into use as a temporary mortuary.
A short way off, Wayfield Park Farm Shop and Café works a first-generation farm raising Sussex cattle and buys from Sussex and the Downs where it can. Coming up the track you may meet cattle, tractors, mud and the occasional goat. On the main road, the garage keeps a convenience shop that doubles as a refreshment stop for walkers.
Walking, riding and cycling are what the village is known for. From the back of the village, footpaths climb Wolstonbury Hill — chalk grassland carrying downland flowers, butterflies, a nationally rare man orchid and anthills each said to hold around a hundred thousand ants. Westward, the South Downs Way runs three to four miles to Devil's Dyke, the longest, widest and deepest dry chalk valley in the country, by way of Saddlescombe Farm, where a donkey wheel once raised water from a well fifty metres deep and the oldest walls date to about 1630. The return brings Jack and Jill, the two windmills above Clayton, into view.
Three riding schools work the surrounding farms — Brendons Stud, Chestnuts and Three Greys — and the bridleways carry horses and bicycles as readily as boots. A village walk crosses part of the golf club.
The village comes in two parts, Pyecombe and Pyecombe Street, a quarter-mile apart; local tradition puts the gap down to a 17th-century plague that emptied the older settlement. The church was granted to Lewes Priory by Adam de Poynings and his wife Beatrice, a gift the Earls Warenne confirmed around 1095 and again in 1140.
Hassocks station is about two miles away, step-free to every platform, and the 270, 271 and 272 buses stop at the garage and run down to Brighton, seven miles south.
At the church, tea is left out for a donation, and there are toilets for anyone who needs them.