Selmeston

One street between two landscapes

The Barley Mow stands on the A27 at the south end of the village, on Lewes Road, and has been a public house for more than two hundred years. Inside there is an open fire. Outside there is a large meadow garden with a wooden play park for children and, kept deliberately apart, a covered and heated garden for adults, served by two outdoor bars and its own outdoor kitchen. Dogs are welcome. The kitchen changes its menu often, though recent plates have run to Malaysian curry, thyme chicken, roast beef and pork roast, with sticky toffee pudding, or crumble and ice cream, to follow. Parking is free.

Selmeston is a single street. The Street follows an old route between the Ouse and the Cuckmere, about eight miles east of Lewes, with the South Downs rising at one end and the Low Weald opening out at the other. For a shop, you drive to Middle Farm at Firle, run by the same family for six generations, where a cider barn and something close to eighty British cheeses reward the trip. Berwick is the nearest station, a field's walk away opposite the Berwick Inn, and the Cuckmere Buses stop by the Barley Mow, though not on every day of the week.

Paths into the Downs

From Bopeep Lane the climb to the top of the Downs is under two kilometres, and from there the paths turn towards Alfriston, Firle and Seaford. The Vanguard Way, sixty-six miles of it, passes straight through. The Cuckmere Pilgrim Path links seven rural churches across the Downs and the Cuckmere valley; the leg from Selmeston to Arlington, past a nature reserve and by way of Berwick station, is an easy 2.7 miles. Arlington Reservoir, a mile and a half off, makes a level hour's circuit with birds on the water. In spring the field paths run through bluebells.

Flint, timber and Domesday traces

St Mary's is a flint church, largely rebuilt in 1865 to 1867 by Ewan Christian, though a church already stood on the site when the Domesday commissioners came. The vicar, W. D. Parish, had every stone of the old building marked and reset during the work; he published A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect in 1875. Inside are two octagonal wooden pillars on stone bases, a late-Perpendicular Easter Sepulchre carrying the name of Beatrice Bray, who died in 1532, and a 1905 window by Charles Kempe. Behind Manor Cottages an Anglo-Saxon cemetery of at least two hundred burials is among the largest in southern England. Domesday found the two holdings here worth four pounds a year, the same as before the Conquest.

Mayday, Keynes and a village memory

By the church door is the grave of Frederick Stanley Mockford, who in 1923, working at Croydon Airport, needed a distress call that would carry over the radio to Le Bourget. He took it from the French m'aidez; it became the international distress call in 1927. John Maynard Keynes rented Tilton House, inside the parish, until he died there in 1946; in 1935 he had stood up at the opening of the village hall, which the two parishes paid for at threepence a week, and addressed the crowd.

A final word on Simpson

Some still say the name was once pronounced Simpson.