Upwaltham

A Church Above the Old Road

St Mary the Virgin stands above the old road from Chichester to Petworth, its churchyard cropped by sheep and backed by open fields. The nave is twelfth-century and the building has been very little restored since. Inside there is a twelfth-century tub font, pre-Reformation graffiti scratched into the walls, and a piscina hollowed from a twelfth-century volute capital, perhaps once part of a pillar piscina. It is one of only three medieval churches in Sussex with an apsidal east end, and it keeps its crown-post roof. The west window, made by M. Lawrence in 2005, sets birds, butterflies and a Lamb of God into the glass.

There is not much village around the church. Upwaltham is a scatter of farms and houses across chalk downland beside the A285, without a centre in any usual sense, and St Mary's is nearly the only survivor of the medieval settlement. When the Domesday surveyors reached the place in 1086 they found it split into two holdings under Earl Roger, with ten cottagers, one enslaved person, and a render of ten swine from the woodland. The whole was worth £3 5s a year.

Fuel for Walkers, History at the Inn

The amenities here are the ones a walker needs. The South Downs Way crosses the A285 to the south at Littleton Farm, where the Cadence Clubhouse serves coffee, porridge, baps and toasties named after cyclists — recent boards have included the Chris Hoy (ham and mature cheddar), the Wiggo (kale, pesto, cheddar and caramelised-onion chutney) and the Merckx (barbecue pulled pork with jalapeños and crispy onions). There is sheltered seating, a toilet, water refills, a cycle pump and a basic repair station. Littleton Farm, which offers camping on the trail, is straightforward about the setting: no shops or pubs adjacent.

For a pub you go to Duncton, a little way along the A285, where The Cricketers occupies a sixteenth-century coaching inn with an inglenook fireplace and a garden. It was the Swan until 1867, when the cricketer John Wisden — founder of the almanack — bought it, renamed it and leased it to Jem Dean, a Duncton-born Sussex fast bowler. Dean died there on Christmas Day 1881, reputedly in the inglenook with a pint. A recent menu has run to steak, ale and mushroom pie; a crab, prawn, haddock and leek gratin; haddock and prawn fishcakes with hollandaise; battered halloumi; and pineapple tarte tatin.

Earthworks and the Four Nations Memorial

The walking is the reason to stay. A 2.4-mile route climbs from the A285 past St Mary's up to West Wood, gaining about ninety metres, and on Upwaltham Hill a Bronze Age cross-dyke — a bank and ditch more than three hundred metres long — still runs across the chalk spur. West Wood also holds the memory of two wartime crashes. A Lancaster of 617 Squadron struck Littleton Down in poor visibility in February 1944, and an American Dakota came down in the wood almost exactly a year later. Inside St Mary's, a white Italian-stone memorial to the fifteen airmen who died — Australian, Canadian, British and American — was paid for by parishioners and unveiled in 2009, with relatives and air attachés from all four countries present.

Arriving Along the A285

Getting here means the A285, the road between Chichester and Petworth. Amberley station is about six miles off along the Way, a linear walk rather than a village link, and the 99 Flex bus between the two towns runs on demand, so you book it rather than wait at a stop.

The Sheep-Cropped Last Word

The sheep have the churchyard mostly to themselves.