Slindon

Lock-up, Landscape and the Spur

On Dyers Lane a small building sits half-sunk into the ground, its flint-and-brick walls under a slate roof, with a boarded door and a single round bullseye window. This is the village lock-up, where offenders were held before constables marched them to Arundel.

The village stands in the foothills of the South Downs, built of brick and flint among beech woods, farms and open downland. Most of it belongs to a 3,500-acre National Trust estate that climbs from the houses up onto the chalk, with long views south across the coastal plain to the sea and more than twenty-five miles of paths.

The Spur sits on the A29 at the edge of the village, a family-owned inn in a seventeenth-century building with log fires, a restaurant, large gardens and a skittle alley. Sunday roasts are confirmed on the current menu. The skittle room and function space host celebrations, classic-car gatherings and the finish of local rallies; ask for Louise or Pamela about the room.

Village Food and Craft

In the middle of the village, the old forge has become the Slindon Forge Village Stores and Café — a shop, a deli and a licensed café in one. It sells homemade savoury pies, pastries, sausage rolls, wraps and quiches alongside cakes, coffee, wine and beer, with seating indoors and out. There are water bowls, dog treats and dog ice cream, and National Trust walking leaflets. The building went up in the nineteenth century, possibly as a wheelwright's shop, became the village blacksmithy by 1896, fell derelict, and was restored and reopened in October 2012.

A short walk away, Slindon Pottery works out of the estate's former wheelwright and carpenter's shop. The pottery was established in the mid-1970s; Janet Upton makes mostly wheel-thrown stoneware and earthenware there, and takes commissions and gives demonstrations.

Walking the Estate and Getting There

The walking is the reason many people come. From Bignor Hill car park, the Roman Ramble to Gumber Farm covers 3.75 miles of open downland and Roman road, past the chalky Leper's Path and a set of Iron Age lynchets. Shorter loops take you through the medieval deer park, whose boundary pale — a bank and ditch built to let deer in but not out — dates from 1108 and can still be traced. Longer routes reach Bignor and Nore Hill, and both the South Downs Way and the Monarch's Way cross the northern end of the estate. There are three free car parks, at Park Lane, Duke's Road and Bignor Hill, and no public toilet anywhere on the estate.

Getting here is by car, off the A27 and the A29. Arundel, Barnham and Amberley stations are each about four miles away and Chichester is eight; by bus, the Compass 85A between Arundel and Chichester stops at Fontwell Village, from where you walk along Orchard Way through the A27 underpass, then cross Duke's Road into the estate.

Church and Cricket

St Mary's Church has a thirteenth-century nave, a fifteenth-century north aisle and a west tower added by Sir Thomas Jackson in 1866. Inside is a wooden effigy of a Tudor knight, thought to be Anthony St Leger, in armour of the Wars of the Roses — the only wooden church effigy in Sussex. Hilaire Belloc wrote a poem about it when he was nine. A tablet remembers Archbishop Stephen Langton, who died here.

Slindon was an important early cricket centre. In the 1740s its team, built around the Newland brothers and the left-handed all-rounder Richard Newland, was a strong contender for the finest team in the country; another of its players, Edward Aburrow, went by "Cuddy" and was a noted smuggler on the side. When they played Portsmouth at Stansted Park in June 1741 the Duke of Richmond reckoned more than five thousand people watched, and Slindon won by nine wickets. Before a later match the Duke wrote of "poor little Slyndon against almost your whole county of Surrey"; afterwards he reported that they had beaten Surrey almost in a single innings. The original ground was lost when the common was enclosed and planted with firs in 1871, and the club moved a short way to the ground it uses now.

Domesday and Pumpkins

The Domesday surveyors recorded thirty-five households here and valued the manor at £20 before the Conquest and £16 twenty years later.

For more than forty years Ralph Upton grew pumpkins in the village, filling his barns with more than fifty varieties of pumpkin and over thirty of squash. He died in 2009, aged 87; the festival was discontinued because of the pandemic and has not returned. But the recipe book he wrote with his wife Barbara remains, and with it the creamy soup they favoured from the blue-grey Crown Prince squash.