In the old cattle yard at Saddlescombe Farm, a caravan and an open-sided historic barn make up the Wildflower Cafe, set directly on the South Downs Way where it threads through the hamlet. The food is homemade, and vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free; recent visitors have carried Welsh rarebit, eggs and hummus on toast, vegan samosas with mango chutney, squash soup and cakes out to a sheltered courtyard that fills up with walkers and cyclists.
That is more or less the extent of the village. Saddlescombe has no shop and no pub. It is a very small working-farm hamlet folded into a winding chalk coombe, surrounded by the chalk grassland and ancient woodland of Newtimber Hill, and sheep were kept here for roughly three thousand years before the practice ended in the twentieth century. Camilla and Roly arrived as tenants in 2013 and became the first resident sheep farmers since 1942.
The farm belongs to the National Trust, which took it on in 1995. The information barn and the donkey wheel are open to visitors; the rest is a working operation and stays closed. The donkey wheel is the thing to find, a huge wooden wheel that drew the hamlet's only reliable water from a well about fifty metres deep, turned for centuries by an animal walking inside it. Stan Hollingdale, who lived at the farm until he died in 2011, remembered it last working in the 1930s. Farm visits can be arranged, and may bring you the grass-fed cattle, the working sheepdogs Fly and Ted, and, weather permitting, a ride on the tractor and trailer.
Saddlescombe Farmhouse itself mixes a timber-framed sixteenth-century south wing with an eighteenth-century red-brick front. Martin Robinson took the tenancy in 1853; his daughter Maude later wrote up a farm childhood in *A South Down Farm in the 1860s*, when twelve oxen still did the heavy work and the family, being Quakers, built better cottages for their labourers.
For a pub you walk. The Shepherd & Dog is a mile away in Fulking; it began as two or three cottages, appears in the 1841 census, and probably took its name from the annual sheep washing in the stream outside. A mile and a half in the other direction, beside the Devil's Dyke viewpoint, the Devil's Dyke serves king prawn cocktail, garlic oven-baked mushrooms, beef and red-wine lasagne, fish pie, sticky toffee pudding and double-chocolate brownie.
The walking is the reason to stay. The Saddlescombe Farm and Newtimber circuit is a moderate mile and a half, starting with a short steep climb and then following open grassland past a disused chalk quarry, a dew pond and views into Devil's Dyke. A longer three-mile route across Newtimber Hill crosses chalk grassland and old woodland where, in summer, you may see Adonis blue, chalkhill blue, dark-green fritillary and silver-spotted skipper. The woods hold bluebells and a lime tree thought to be a thousand years old, and from the higher ground the views reach to the sea, the Weald and Chanctonbury Ring.
The estate has passed through a long line of hands, including the Knights Templar, who were given it in the 1220s and ran it as a preceptory, drawing profits from sheep and arable to fund the order. The Domesday surveyors had counted thirty-three households here. There is no church in the hamlet; the parish church, St John the Evangelist, stands in Newtimber.
There is no station either. Brighton and Hassocks are each five miles off, and there is no parking at the farm, so most people leave a car at Summerdown, a quarter-mile away, or take the weekend Breeze 77 bus up to Devil's Dyke and walk in along the ridge.
Back in the courtyard, a chicken named Bob works his way between the tables.