At the end of a garden in Rodmell stands a small weatherboarded lodge where Virginia Woolf wrote most of her major books. It belongs to Monk's House, which she and Leonard bought at auction in 1919 for £700. Leonard turned the old working plot into an orchard, an ornamental garden and a vegetable garden, and the lodge was hung with paintings by her sister Vanessa Bell and her niece Angelica Garnett. The house is now run by the National Trust on timed entry, so you book before you come. There is no evidence that any monks ever lived there. It was previously called Cleeres, and before that Glazebrooks, and where the present name came from nobody has settled.
The village sits in the Ouse valley, between the chalk of the South Downs and the river's water meadows. It is strung along the C7, four miles south of Lewes and five miles north of Newhaven.
The Abergavenny Arms stands on that road, well placed for both the house and the hills. It is an old country pub with oak beams — said to have come from Spanish Armada wrecks — an indoor well, a real fire and a garden. Dark Star Hophead and Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter are the regular ales. The kitchen's sample menu includes Sussex Smokie, which is smoked haddock in a leek-and-mustard cream under a panko-and-cheddar crumb; Harvey's beer-battered haddock; Turner's local pork sausages with mash; a beetroot and goat's-cheese tarte tatin; sticky pork-belly bites. Dogs are welcome, and there is a separate bar off to one side for the games. It reopened under new owners in late 2022.
Most people come to walk. The National Trust's Southease to Monk's House circular is a moderate three and a half miles, an hour to ninety minutes, starting from Southease station and running past the Southease church, across the water meadows, over a low hill that opens up the whole Ouse valley, and down into Rodmell by the house. After rain the riverbank paths flood and the ground turns to deep mud, so bring the right boots and keep dogs on their leads. Rodmell also lies on the Egrets Way between Lewes and Newhaven, a short way from the South Downs Way, and the crossing from Southease station — about a mile and a half over the meadows — is a good way to arrive without a car. The Compass Travel 123 links the village to Lewes and Newhaven, Monday to Saturday.
St Peter's is the parish church, Grade I listed: the chancel, nave and south chapel go back to the early twelfth century, the west tower and south aisle to the end of it. It has a shingled spire and a small south annexe now used as a baptistry.
By the time of the Domesday survey the place was among the larger recorded settlements — a hundred and fifty-three recorded households across three holdings, with a hundred and forty-four acres of meadow, eleven salthouses and a church. The three manors were together worth forty-seven pounds a year in 1086, down from seventy twenty years before.
For a day out, Lewes is four miles north, with its castle and the Barbican House Museum; Charleston, the farmhouse Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant filled with Bloomsbury and painted over every surface of, is near Firle. But the thing to do in Rodmell is quieter than any of that. Sit in the garden Leonard planted, look up at the lodge, and understand what Virginia meant when she said of the place, "One lives in the brain there – I slip easily from writing to reading."