The flint tower of All Saints has a lower stage that is Norman and a stage above it early fourteenth century, the church built of flint and Eastbourne stone rubble. Beside it is the Old Parsonage, a late-thirteenth-century priest's house with trefoil-headed lights and a projecting stair turret, still flint-faced after seven hundred years. There is no pub in the village. The lane runs down to a pond and out to Exceat and the A259, and that is the extent of it.
The village sits in a long valley folding up into the Downs from the Cuckmere. The trees around it are younger than they look: Friston Forest, the beech woodland that now encloses Westdean, was planted from the late 1920s and is the largest area of recently established forest in South East England. From Butchershole car park a one-mile loop called Butchers Trudge is waymarked with white footprints through the high beeches. The longer Alfriston and River Cuckmere circular — six or seven miles on quiet roads, forest tracks and uneven paths, with stiles and a few short climbs — drops through the forest to the pond, follows the South Downs Way through the village, and comes back beside the river. Seaford is the nearest station; on Tuesdays and Fridays the Cuckmere Community Bus 40 calls at Westdean Pond, and on summer weekends the 47 Ramblerbus reaches the forest car park.
For food you leave the village. The Cuckmere Inn stands by Exceat Bridge above the valley, doing home-baked pies, salmon with a king-prawn and white-wine sauce, and a Pimm's strawberry trifle. At East Dean, the fifteenth-century Tiger Inn faces the green with real ales, an open fire and a menu of Long Man-battered fish and chips, Sussex Charmer ploughman's and Prinkle Farm pork-and-herb sausages. The Plough & Harrow at Litlington welcomes dogs if you say so when you book, and its garden tables are first-come. Nearer still, Saltmarsh Farmhouse at Exceat serves breakfast and lunch inside a sixteenth-century farmhouse with a heated, flint-walled courtyard, and Sunday roasts in its Friston room.
Inside All Saints are two medieval tomb canopies, thought to be for Sir John Heringod and Lady Isabella. Heringod left the rents from two fields, called Tapersland and Lampland, to keep wax tapers and a lamp burning over his wife's tomb. There is a square font on octagonal columns, an alabaster monument of about 1639 to William Thomas, and two bronze heads — one of the painter Sir Oswald Birley, who bought Charleston Manor north of the village in 1931 and turned its barn into a studio and a small theatre, and one of Lord Waverley, better known as Sir John Anderson, the wartime Home Secretary the Anderson shelter was named after. He is buried in the churchyard.
The church also keeps the memory of Exceat, the fishing village that once stood across the fields towards the sea and dwindled until its parish merged with West Dean in 1528. In 1913 a fifteen-year-old named Maurice Lawrance, son of the rector, noticed indentations in a field above the Cuckmere and told his father. The dig that followed uncovered the buried church, its nave just thirty-one feet long. A Portland-stone block in Seven Sisters Country Park now marks the spot. Three years after his discovery, Maurice was killed in France, aged eighteen, with no known grave. He is remembered on a wall of the church whose lost neighbour he found.