The Selsey Arms has poured drinks in the Lavant Valley for around two hundred years, and came under new management in 2026. Its kitchen leans local and seasonal: ham-hock and cave-aged Cheddar croquettes, haddock fishcakes with a mango-and-coconut dip, slow-cooked sweet-chilli beef brisket, pork belly with black-pudding stuffing and cider gravy. There is beer-battered haddock for the unadventurous and a beetroot-and-peanut-butter burger with goat's cheese for everyone else, and puddings run to apple-and-frangipane pie and treacle tart. One recent guest, Sarah S, praised Terry's "warm and friendly" welcome. Dogs are allowed, there is a courtyard garden for when the weather cooperates, and five bedrooms upstairs mean you can stay without driving home.
West Dean Stores and Tea Room is run by the estate. It sells apple juice pressed from the West Dean orchards, free-range eggs from Rookery Farm, loaves and pastries brought over from Sodt Bakery in Petworth, local honey, and Deerview preserves and chutneys. You can order a cream tea, a bacon sandwich or a Cumberland-sausage bap, alongside the usual fruit, vegetables, dairy, logs and pet food. For a village this small, it holds a lot on its shelves.
West Dean is a flint village, brick quoins picking out the corners, sitting wholly inside the South Downs National Park. The River Lavant runs through both village and gardens, but it is a winterbourne: it flows in winter and dries each summer, so the watercourse you cross in July may be an empty channel. Chalk hills close in on either side, Bow Hill to one and St Roche's Hill, with its Iron Age fort the Trundle, to the other.
The flint mansion at the centre of everything is West Dean College. James Wyatt enlarged the house between 1804 and 1808, gave it a castle-like profile and made it one of the largest flint-faced buildings in the country. The gardens are a major draw: a hundred-metre pergola designed by Harold Peto, a walled kitchen garden, a restored Sunken Garden and thirteen working Victorian glasshouses. The orchard holds over a hundred apple varieties and forty-five kinds of pear. Picnics are allowed and dogs are welcome on short leads.
For walking, the Centurion Way follows the old Chichester-to-Midhurst railway, which carried passengers from 1881 until 1991 and is now an 11-kilometre, 6.8-mile path, mostly flat or slightly hilly, running from Chichester through Lavant and West Dean to Cucumber Farm in Singleton. The Monarch's Way, a 615-mile trail tracing Charles II's escape after Worcester, comes down off Stoughton Down, crosses the Lavant and climbs St Roche's Hill toward Goodwood. On the edge of the parish, Kingley Vale holds a forest of ancient yews, some more than five hundred years old and over five metres round. Keep dogs on leads there; the reserve grazes stock and protects wildlife across fourteen scheduled monuments.
The estate's twentieth century belonged to Edward James, born in 1907 with King Edward VII for a godfather. James was a patron of the Surrealists, owning works by Dalí and Magritte and having a hand in the Mae West Lips Sofa and the Lobster Telephone. He left the estate to a foundation in 1964, the college opened in 1971, and he is buried among the specimen trees of St Roche's Arboretum. His old house, Monkton, sits privately nearby, its interior once fitted with palm-tree columns and a domed alabaster bathroom; it is a story rather than a place you can visit.
Chichester lies about five miles south-west, reached along the A286, with the nearest railway station and a cathedral beside the Market Cross. The Stagecoach 60 bus links the two through Lavant and Singleton, and Singleton itself has the Weald & Downland Living Museum, fifty-odd historic buildings reassembled across the valley and worth the better part of a day.
A wood-fuel district-heating system, fed by the estate's own timber, supplies heating and hot water to the college, the glasshouses, the visitor centre, estate houses and St Andrew's church, enough, the estate likes to claim, to make it the warmest church in southern England. Inside, a wall monument to Sir Richard Lewknor, dead since 1616, lays one stone figure out flat while two of his sons kneel at his side.