The Frankland Arms stands where Washington's old east–west and north–south roads meet, and it exists because of them: the pub went up after both routes became turnpikes and began pulling traffic through the village. Mat and Yan run it now. The kitchen turns out steaks, sausage and mash, fish pie and a full Great British fry-up, with specials that change by the day, and the bar keeps local and national real ales alongside a pool table and a dartboard. There is a beer garden, free customer parking, and a stated fondness for dogs; the pub calls itself very pet friendly and leaves it at that.
A short way along London Road, beside Squires Garden Centre, the Village Larder has been trading since 2012. Its cheese counter runs under the name Mr & Mrs Cheese, kept by a brother and sister, Joe and Hollie, who carry more than fifty artisan cheeses from Sussex and further afield and will order in whatever they don't already stock. Cheese boards, charcuterie and accompaniments fill out the rest.
Above all of this rises Chanctonbury Ring, the beech-crowned hill fort that makes the skyline. The village sits at a wind-gap in the South Downs, where the passage down to the Worthing coastal plain meets the old ridge routes, and the historic nucleus now lies inside the South Downs National Park. From the car park on the South Downs Way, a 2.9-mile loop climbs fairly steeply to the Ring for long views over the Weald before dropping back through woodland; the descent turns slippery in the wet. Longer days follow the ridge to Cissbury Ring, Sussex's largest hill fort at around sixty-five acres, or come east from Amberley over six or seven miles, finishing across a footbridge over the A24.
The clump itself was planted in 1760 by Charles Goring; the 1987 storm badly damaged the trees, after which the Ring was excavated. Underneath is far older ground — a four-acre Iron Age fort holding the sites of two Roman temples, the higher of them once painted bright red. Local belief holds that walking seven times round the Ring will summon, depending on who is telling it, the Devil, a druid, a rider on a white horse, or Julius Caesar and his army.
Down in the village, St Mary's keeps a 12th-century arcade along the north side of its nave and a 15th-century west tower; the rest was rebuilt by Gordon Hills in 1866–67, at the instigation of the Rev J. W. Knight, an Oxford Movement vicar. The Victorian church once carried remarkable painted decoration, most of it obliterated in 1962.
The name is first recorded in 947 and means the homestead of Wassa's people. By 1086 the Domesday commissioners counted 158 households here, putting Washington in the largest fifth of recorded English settlements, its woodland reckoned at seventy swine and its holding running to five salthouses. Nine villagers were later pardoned for their part in Jack Cade's rebellion of 1450.
The village sits on the A24 between Horsham and Worthing, Storrington three miles west and Steyning five to the east; no railway ever reached it, and one car-free option is Metrobus 23 to Worthing railway station. On Heath Common, after the First World War, Vera Pragnell bought fifty acres and founded The Sanctuary, handing out half-acre plots to impoverished Christians, Communists and other communitarians; its wooden shacks and her hilltop Calvary have all but disappeared. Rock Windmill, a smock mill of 1827, lost its sweeps and machinery long ago and became a house, where the composer John Ireland lived.
Robin Milner-Gulland, writing a parish history in 2013, called the old village "picturesque without being showy," which suits a place that has spent centuries looking up at the same clump of trees on the hill.