Tillington

The Horse Guards: garden and kitchen

Behind the Horse Guards Inn there is a garden most people miss from the road: deckchairs, straw-bale seats and sheepskin-covered benches, with chickens and cats moving between the herb and vegetable beds that supply the kitchen. The inn itself is three former cottages joined into rooms on several levels, with oak beams, stripped floorboards and open fires. It has stood here for around 350 years, directly opposite the church.

The kitchen works from a small menu that changes daily around British produce, local suppliers, the vegetable patch and foraged ingredients. Diners have eaten Petworth muntjac ragù with pasta, Goodwood beef carpaccio, cod fritters, veal escalope and Polish honey cake; South Coast halibut with mussels, butterbeans and wild garlic; venison burgers; and gammon with a duck egg and chips. Harvey's Sussex Best is the regular cask beer, joined by two changing guest ales from breweries such as Hammerpot, Langham and Arundel, and the pub makes its own sloe gin, mulled wine and Pimm's. Well-behaved dogs are welcome. The Sussex food writer Nick Mosley described the service here as "informal professionalism with a genuine smile."

Competing stories and a crowned church

The name is disputed. The inn traces it to the 1840s, when Household Cavalry drank here while their horses rested on Petworth Estate grass under Lord Egremont's eye; another account puts a regiment in Petworth Park during the Napoleonic Wars. The pub keeps both traditions rather than choosing between them.

Across the road is All Hallows, and the thing you notice is the tower. Curved buttresses lift into an open stone crown, which Historic England considers unique among Sussex churches. The tower appears in work by both Turner and Constable; Constable made a drawing of the church in 1834, after Lord Egremont invited him to Petworth a mile across the park. Inside, the nave is transitional Norman, the chancel thirteenth-century, and much of the rest was rebuilt in 1807. There is a plain twelfth-century font, and the upper floor of the west porch, once the Egremont family pew, is now the parish room.

Parkland paths and vineyard slopes

The village sits on a sandstone ridge above the A272 between Midhurst and Petworth, with the wall of Petworth Park to the east and long views south over the Rother Valley to the Downs. Footpaths run out through woodland and vineyard slopes towards Upperton and into the park itself. Petworth's 700-acre deer park is the neighbour: fallow deer, lakes, veteran sweet chestnuts, and an oak roughly 940 years old that was a sapling around the Conquest. Keep dogs under close control, because the deer graze freely. The house holds twenty Turner oils, the largest collection outside the Tate, painted by a man who came back to this estate again and again.

Reached through the village on the A272 is Roebuck Estates at Upperton Farm, whose south-facing greensand slopes carry the county's oldest sparkling-wine vines, planted in 2006: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier. Tours and tastings are ticketed and booked in advance rather than dropped into.

Deep history and practical access

Tillington is old. In 1086 the Domesday surveyors recorded forty-five households and valued the whole place at eight pounds and six shillings, with a single mill worth a pound; before the Conquest it had belonged to Edeva the Fair. The local parish history keeps a stranger record from 1324, when William de la Zouche was to supply twenty flagons of wine, two of beer, two ox carcasses, six herons, four swans and ninety-four nuts for Edward II's stay at Petworth.

The village is a mile west of Petworth on the cross-country road. Pulborough station is about six miles off, and Stagecoach service 1 between the coast, Petworth and Midhurst stops around 150 metres from the pub.

The recreation ground with a view

Midway along the lane to Upperton is the recreation ground, with its pavilion and pitches for tennis, football and cricket. On a clear afternoon it is popular with dog walkers and picnics, the Downs laid out below.