Streat

Farm Beds and a Nearby Gastropub

On a fifteen-acre plot at the foot of the chalk, Keivor and Laure grow the vegetables, herbs and flowers that stock My Little Farm. The couple started the project after lockdown walks in 2020, and the Streat Garden was their first field. The farm shop sells seasonal vegetables, heritage-hen eggs, grass-fed meat, dairy, sourdough and pantry goods, alongside apothecary products made from the herbs and flowers grown a few yards away. On the last Saturday of each month they run a tour: you meet the heritage chickens and pigs and walk the growing beds, and under-16s go free. The ground is uneven, and they tell you so before you arrive.

Streat itself has little more shopping than that, because this is a very small settlement, and much of what you will want is a short drive out of it. For a pub, East Chiltington has the Jolly Sportsman, a gastropub with rooms at the foot of the Downs where well-behaved dogs are welcomed throughout, bedrooms included. The kitchen leans on local meat and Sussex wine, and Sunday roasts have typically come with roast potatoes, seasonal vegetables and gravy. There is a large garden with an outdoor bar.

The Half Moon in Plumpton

Plumpton, the other way, has the Half Moon on Ditchling Road. Menus have run from gammon, egg and chips to fresh Newhaven seafood, pork belly, a butternut-squash curry and a British steak burger with chips and coleslaw. It pours wine grown and made up the road at Plumpton College, and its play garden has mini golf, a climbing frame, tunnels, a rope climb, a sandpit and swings.

Beacon, Downs and Jubilee Trees

The reason to be here, though, is the ground itself. Streat sits inside the South Downs National Park, its church and manor at the foot of the escarpment and the parish running north from the Downs. Above it rises Ditchling Beacon, at 248 metres the highest point in East Sussex, with views to the sea, across the Weald and along the Downs. A four-to-five-mile circular from the Beacon follows the South Downs Way over inclines and muddy, uneven ground; a shorter, steeper history walk passes an Iron Age hillfort, dewponds, the old lime works and Anglo-Saxon burial mounds, dogs on leads throughout. On the scarp above the village a V-shaped plantation of trees, said to have been planted for Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887, is the landmark you will keep picking out on the skyline. Sussex Villages calls Streat "a tiny place with a big landmark."

Church and Manor

The compact historic heart is the church and Streat Place, standing about sixty metres apart. The church nave is around 1200, the chancel thirteenth-century, with a shingled bell turret and spirelet; inside there is a Robert Thompson lectern carved with his signature mouse and a set of Charles II royal arms dated 1660. Streat Place, faced in knapped flint under a Horsham-slab roof, was probably built for Walter Dobell between 1607 and 1627. Local legend has it that its hall fireplace hid a space large enough for a fugitive Royalist to ride his horse into during the Civil War; horse and rider, the story goes, were never seen again.

Roman Roads and Modern Carving

The village takes its name from the Roman road that runs north of the church, straight towards Lewes. The sculptor John Skelton moved here in 1958 and turned a coach house into his workshop; his carving survives in the churchyard, cut by his daughter Helen Mary.