The River Lavant does not always run through Singleton. It is a winterbourne, a chalk stream that stays dry through the summer and begins to flow here first, at the village, when the water table rises in late autumn; the springs farther up the valley follow later. Old sheep dips still survive along its banks, from the days when the water had a working purpose.
The village sits where two valleys meet in the chalk hills north of Chichester, one running east to west through West Dean, Charlton and East Dean, the other carrying the Midhurst road north. Walk in and you pass steep chalk grassland, beech and yew woods, and cottages of thatch or flint and brick. The A286 runs through on its way between Chichester and Midhurst, and the Stagecoach 60 stops here on the same route.
The Partridge Inn is the village pub, Grade II listed and once called the Fox and Hounds. It keeps three fireplaces, does wood-fired pizza and Sunday roasts, and regularly serves Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter. The garden has plenty of seating and a play area for children; dogs get treats and water bowls. Jacob and April are the current hosts. One recent visitor came away wanting to name a member of staff called Georgia, which tells you something about the kind of welcome the place manages on a good day.
Half a mile east, at Charlton but still within the parish, is the Fox Goes Free. It has low beams, log fires, tiled and stone floors, and a garden of handmade benches and patios looking towards Levin Down. The kitchen turns out vegetable-kedgeree arancini, crispy lamb belly with peas and wild-garlic aioli, the Fox fish pie, chicken-and-leek pie, and Arundel-lager-battered fish and chips, with a Stilton-glazed sweet-potato nut roast for anyone skipping the meat. The bar has its own 3.8% Fox Goes Free Best Bitter and 4.2% Sussex Gold from the Arundel Brewery. In November 1915, when Singleton's new village hall was reserved for men, the innkeeper Mrs Laishley opened the Fox instead, and the first Women's Institute meeting in England was held here.
The reason most people come to Singleton stands on 40 acres at the edge of it. The Weald & Downland Living Museum is an open-air collection of more than fifty historic buildings, rescued from across the region and rebuilt around gardens, farm animals, a mill pond and a working watermill. The BBC films The Repair Shop in one of them. Dogs are welcome across most of the site on short leads, though not in the watermill, bakehouse, dairy or Tudor kitchen, where food is being made.
The parish church, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, is Grade I listed and older than it first looks. The lower tower holds early-eleventh-century fabric, laid in herringbone courses, from before the Conquest. Inside there is a fifteenth-century octagonal font, medieval bench ends, and graffiti that includes the ragged staff of the Earls of Warwick. In the nineteenth century the dedication was changed by mistake to St John; it was put back in 1979.
The Domesday surveyors counted 167 households, three mills and a church, and valued the manor at £121, up from £89 twenty years earlier.
For walking, the National Trust's Hat Hill to Levin Down circuit starts from the Partridge and runs 4.75 miles over beech woods, chalk grassland and a juniper grotto, with views back down over the roofs. A marker along the way records a fox hunt of 26 January 1738 that covered 57 miles and lasted from a quarter to eight in the morning until ten to six that evening, which the second Duke of Richmond called "the greatest chase that ever was." The Centurion Way, a flat walking and cycling route on the old Chichester-to-Midhurst railway, reaches the village at Cucumber Farm; sections through the former Singleton Station reopened in 2025, and parts remain subject to construction, so it is worth checking access before you set out.
Down at Sheepwash Meadow, where the Lavant once filled the dips, the cricket club plays through the summer.