Telscombe

A Lane That Ends Here

The lane into Telscombe comes from the north and ends there. It leaves the C7 between Lewes and Newhaven, runs for two miles across open ground, and stops at a group of flint buildings folded into a coombe of the chalk Downs. The sea is close, just over the hill to the south, but no road runs through to it. To reach the coast by car you go the long way round to Peacehaven, about eight miles. Telscombe sits in its dip and lets the rest of the coast get on with being developed.

There is no pub here, no shop. What there is, mainly, is the church, the village hall and the down.

Flint, Faith and a Grand National

St Laurence stands at the centre, Grade I and built of flint. The site is recorded as having had a church by AD 966; the nave and chancel you see are largely twelfth-century, with the north aisle, north-east chapel and west tower added late in the same century. Inside there is a thirteenth-century font, of the same broad family as the one at Piddinghoe down the valley, and a twelfth-century piscina with a projecting marble bowl carved underneath with something like acanthus leaves. Above the chancel arch are wall paintings from 1905, commissioned by Ambrose Gorham. The Victoria County History called the reconstructed chancel arch "a pseudo-Norman monstrosity." The church is not reliably open, so arrange to have it unlocked before you come.

Gorham is the reason much of Telscombe looks the way it does. A bookmaker, he came to live at Stud Farm around 1890 and trained horses on the gallops up on the Tye. In 1902 his mare Shannon Lass, trained by James Hackett, won the Grand National at 20 to 1. Gorham put money into restoring the church, and when he died in 1933 he left his village property in trust. Gorham's Gift still owns eight cottages and Stud Farm, maintains the listed buildings and the village hall, and exists in part to keep the place quiet.

From Village Buildings to Open Down

The other buildings repay a slow look. The Manor House, eighteenth-century with an older interior and a round flint tower added in the nineteenth, once belonged to the National Trust and served as lodgings for visiting judges, down to a chauffeured car. Old School Cottage was the village school, built around 1840, and is now a private house.

Above the village is Telscombe Tye, 211 acres of open downland registered as common and access land, grazed by sheep and extending towards the cliff top. A four-mile circuit from Longridge Avenue crosses the Tye, passes a restored dew pond and comes into the village by bridleway; it is mostly level and takes about ninety minutes. Two Bronze Age bowl barrows and a long cross-dyke survive in the turf. Keep dogs close where the sheep are.

Out to Rodmell for Food and Woolf

For food you go out. The Abergavenny Arms at Rodmell, a fifteenth-century pub, has served Sussex Smokie, Harvey's beer-battered haddock, Turner's local pork sausages with mash and onion gravy, and a beetroot and goat's-cheese tarte tatin — worth checking the current menu before you set off. It stands close to Monk's House, where the Woolfs lived and Virginia wrote in a lodge at the bottom of the garden. A nearby station is Southease, on the Lewes–Seaford line, unstaffed and without refreshments.

When the Tye Falls Quiet

Come evening the walkers have gone back over the Tye, the lane carries nobody through to anywhere, and the sheep have the down to themselves.