Tarring Neville

Flint, Road and River

St Mary's is flint-walled, its low nave and aisle running to a chancel longer than the rest of the church put together and lit by tall lancet windows. The west tower wears a tiled pyramidal roof. Inside are 17th-century altar rails, a 13th-century piscina with a broken bowl, choir stalls by Richard Norman Shaw carved with large poppyheads, and stained glass of 1892 designed by J. W. Brown. The octagonal medieval font sits against the aisle wall rather than free in the nave, perhaps to keep a crack out of sight. The church is Grade I listed, which is a lot of protection for a building that serves seven cottages, two farms and not much else.

That is the village: a small roadside cluster on the A26 between Lewes and Newhaven, under the eastern edge of the Downs and one of the few old settlements on the east side of the Ouse valley. North-west of Manor Farmhouse stands an early-19th-century barn, also listed, faced in flint with red-brick quoins under a hipped slate roof; its wagon entrance has largely been bricked in.

The Altered Ouse

The land holds as much interest as the buildings. On one side the flat alluvial floodplain of the Ouse, threaded with drainage ditches and embankments; on the other the open chalk downland rising behind. River engineers straightened much of the Ouse after an Act of 1791, and a water-filled former double loop still survives south-west of the village, with curving earthworks marking the old course where the river once divided Tarring Neville from Piddinghoe. From Itford Hill you can follow the valley by eye from Lewes down to the sea.

Two quieter histories sit in the same fields. In June 1942 camouflage netting covered a 185-metre by 70-metre stretch of the river as far upstream as Tarring Neville, apparently to hide vessels from aircraft, possibly in preparation for the Dieppe Raid that August. And the village quarry produced high-quality chalk for specialist plasters until 2014; none is quarried anywhere in East Sussex now.

Across the Valley

For anything to eat or buy you cross the valley or follow the road. Southease station, just off the A26 on the South Downs Way, is the nearest railhead — Southern services, ticket machines and shelters, no ticket office or refreshments. From there a 3.5-mile circuit crosses the river and takes in the Norman church at Southease, Rodmell's St Peter's and the Abergavenny Arms, and Monk's House, before returning along a bridleway and the riverbank. The ditches and fields draw migrating and overwintering birds.

The Abergavenny Arms, a 15th-century pub in Rodmell, is a nearby option for home-cooked food: burgers built on Sussex beef with Brighton Blue, a beer-battered haddock called the Captain Haddock, spiced fried halloumi, buttermilk chicken and a vegan Moving Mountains, alongside local cask ales. Reaching it by car means routing round a crossing rather than driving straight across the water. South of the village at Denton, the Flying Fish stocks Harvey's and Shepherd Neame, a large rear garden with a decked terrace, and dogs on leads everywhere but the restaurant. Piddinghoe Farm Shop, over on the Lewes Road, began as an outlet for the farm's game and lamb and has widened its range from there.

Houses of History and Play

Monk's House, Virginia and Leonard Woolf's weatherboarded retreat in Rodmell, opens on selected days and needs booking; the writing lodge in its garden is where Virginia wrote most of her major work. For a wet afternoon there is Newhaven Fort, where an adventure playground with a shingle-hoist climbing frame and a giant slide sits beside the historical displays.

From Domesday to the Bell

The Domesday surveyors counted 23 households here in 1086 and valued the whole place at £10 a year to its lord, Count Robert of Mortain. John Thomas Jarman, born in the village in 1888, left the school at twelve to plough the Downs with horses; his son James Jarman recalled him tolling the church bell thirteen times, then pausing, to announce the death of Queen Victoria.