The church at Southease has a round tower, one of only three along the Ouse valley built that way, and it stands above a triangular green with the water meadows spread flat below. Thatched and flint cottages sit around the green. That is more or less the village: a green, a scatter of houses, the round-towered church and a river crossing.
The crossing is the reason most people come on foot. The South Downs Way runs a hundred miles across the chalk and passes straight through here, over the Ouse by a swing bridge. Henry E. Wallis designed it in 1878 and Shaw & Co. built it in 1880; its span once pivoted open to let masted vessels through, which is unusual, since bridges that open tend to belong to docks rather than to a lane in the Downs. It was fixed in place in 1988, though the pivot table is still there. The river beneath it was canalised between 1791 and 1795, to William Jessop's design, under a Lewes schoolmaster turned engineer named Cater Rand.
There is no pub in Southease and no shop. Beside the station, a short walk back over the bridge, the Courtyard Café at YHA South Downs occupies a refurbished farmhouse and its barns, and it is the only place by the station to get a coffee. The station itself has trains from Lewes and Newhaven but no staff, no refreshments and nowhere to park, and parking by the green is just as scarce.
For a proper meal you walk across the fields to Rodmell and the Abergavenny Arms, a 15th-century pub on the same trail. The kitchen runs to pizza, Monday burgers and Thursday steaks; the burgers take in Sussex beef, spiced halloumi, buttermilk chicken and a beer-battered haddock called Captain Haddock. Harvey's Sussex Best and Dark Star Hophead are the regular ales, with changing beers from Gun and Long Man. Dogs are welcome, there is a garden, and there is a well indoors.
The walk to Rodmell is a circuit of about three and a half miles that most people make for one house at the end of it. Monk's House was Leonard and Virginia Woolf's country retreat from 1919, a weatherboarded place with Leonard's garden and the writing lodge where Virginia wrote most of her major works. "The depression of a return to London from Rodmell is always acute," she wrote; "one lives in the brain there." The path passes St Peter's, climbs the down for a view back towards Lewes, and returns along the Ouse. It can be very muddy; in winter the water meadows are no place for a pushchair.
Inside the church are wall paintings from around 1280, worn but readable: Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey, Christ before Pilate, the Scourging, and a Christ in Majesty on the west wall. There is a square font that may be twelfth-century, plain 17th-century benches, a two-decker pulpit and a Tudor communion table. King Edgar granted the land to the abbey at Winchester in 966, and the abbey still held it at Domesday, recorded then as sixty households, twenty-eight ploughlands and a hundred and thirty acres of meadow.
Come off the Way muddy at the end of the day and the café by the station is a good place to dry out before the train.