Plumpton, East Sussex

Plumpton Green is essentially a ribbon development immediately to the north of the railway station and is home to the school, the village shop, a church and two pubs. The main thoroughfare, Station Road, runs the length of the village, with several cul-de-sacs branching from it. The majority of the road is paved on one side only.

Chapel Road is a cul-de-sac with 24 houses. These are mostly semi-detached, with a small terrace of cottages built in 1900. Woodgate Meadow is a fairly recent development of large, detached houses on the site of a former brickyard. Westgate was built on farmland some years later (1995) incorporating mainly detached houses and also the new village hall and green.

Plumpton Lane, connecting Plumpton and Plumpton Green has, in recent years, received several small housing developments. The houses are of an attractive design, incorporating traditional red Sussex tile-hung walls.

Plumpton railway station is on the East Coastway Line and the railway crossing had the last manually operated gates in Sussex, until finally replaced by automatic gates in 2016. As of December 2010 it has had an hourly service in each direction, between Eastbourne, Hastings and Ore and London Victoria. Plumpton Racecourse is located between the two villages, immediately to the south of the railway. Meetings draw large crowds and on race days the population of Plumpton doubles and the rail service is supplemented with extra trains. Races are sometimes televised, bringing Plumpton to a much wider audience.

There are a number of historic and notable buildings in the area.

Plumpton Church, R. H. Nibbs

The naves of Plumpton church (TQ 356 134) and Westmeston church (TQ338 136) were built by the Normans, with later chancel and south aisle at Westmeston, and later tower and chancel at Plumpton. Stone buildings were exceptionally rare in those times hence their small size. Both of them had frescoes painted by the Lewes Group which were uncovered only in 1862, although those at Westmeston were not preserved. Parts of the paintings at Plumpton, on the north wall of the nave, do survive and have recently been restored. Extraordinarily, it is thought that the wooden bell hanging frame may date back to 1040. The stone tower may have been built around the original wooden tower and its bell hanging. Plumpton church is surrounded by Plumpton College. Newly planted trees look to further obscure our view of it. The churchyard is currently badly maintained for meadow species.

In Plumpton Green stands All Saints Church (TQ 363 168). Archaic vegetation survives in the front churchyard and has lots of common spotted orchid amongst oxeye daisy, sorrel, bugle, meadow foxtail, ladies smock and thale cress. The larger yard at the back is often unkempt, and may have lost some value.

The pub was originally sited by Bower Farm but was relocated to the crossroads when the airfield was built in the second world war. There is a monument to the airmen by the pub.

Behind the Plough Inn is an archaic meadow, used as a campsite by the pub. It has old flowery sward, oxeye daisy, knapweed, fleabane, and even bits of saw wort, which the pub is commendably trying to manage (2015). In the autumn there are old meadow fungi such as cedarwood waxcap and fairy club. Unlike Worcestershire, where many pubs that have old meadows attached to them, the Plough is special for maintaining its meadow, as this is not a strong Sussex tradition.

Plumpton College is a Further and Higher education college with a variety of land-based courses, including Viticulture and Oenology, Agriculture, Horticulture, Floristry, Equine Studies, Animal Care and Veterinary Nursing, Countryside Management and so on.[6]

Plumpton Place

Plumpton Place stands next to Plumpton College. It is a six-bedroom manor house with a moat and water mill (TQ 361 136) which run into Plumton Mill stream. It had a big 17th century threshing barn, which is used by Plumpton College.

In the early 1970s, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page purchased Plumpton Place, an Elizabethan manor, with 20th-century alterations by Sir Edwin Lutyens, surrounded by a moat and extensive gardens. With its relative proximity to Plumpton Racecourse, the grounds also include stables for horses. Page outfitted the manor with a recording studio and the credits for the Led Zeppelin album In Through the Out Door indicates that album mixing was carried out there. The manor can be seen briefly near the beginning of the Led Zeppelin concert film, The Song Remains the Same where the camera walks up to Page, playing a hurdy-gurdy, to inform him of the North American tour dates. Page sold the property in 1985.

Flint Barn, Ashurst Lane

Ashurst Farm, by Plumpton Racecourse, has had an organic farm since 1994. Until then, the dairy cows had been hand-milked, and the land had received no artificial fertilisers since 1945, thus facilitating immediate organic status.[7] The farm has a vegetable box scheme and employs much local labour.

There are a number of beautiful and ancient woodland in this area.

The southern Plumpton Wood (TQ355 145) stands on wet Gault Clay and is a hazel coppice wood, with no hornbeam present. It is owned by Plumpton College and stands to its north. It has at least twenty-two archaic woodland indicator species. It has remarkably varied vegetation, which includes a thick bluebell carpet in springtime, oak and ash standards, a gean swarm, wild service and pignut. It has large damp areas with ramsons, redcurrant, and even alder buckthorn. The last pearl-bordered fritillary butterfly was seen in Plumpton Wood in 1982, but perhaps one day they will be reintroduced with the small pearl-bordered fritillary, both of which were a common sight in all Sussex woodlands before the 1980s.[7]

The northern Plumpton Wood stands on Weald Clay (TQ 365 185) and is equally remarkable, although about 40% has been cleared in modern times and has chunks bitten out of it by houses and gardens. It is hornbeam coppice with far less hazel than the southern Plumpton Wood. There is wych elm and wild service, spurge laurel and midland thorn, and in 2011 green hellebore, birdsnest and greater butterfly orchids were recorded.[7]

The Mill Stream

The Plumpton Mill Stream flows north through the parish, to join the Bevern Stream just north of the railway. In turn, the Bevern Stream flows into the River Ouse at Barcombe Mills. The streams and their banks are delightful green ribbons through the parish's farmed landscape.

The Plumpton Mill Stream arises at Plumpton Place. The Stream once had three water mills. The pond of the Upper Mill is now a wilderness of alder carr and marsh marigolds, anachronistically called 'Reed Pond'. The bed of the Stream is made up of flint shingle brought there by Ice age torrents. The chalk stream has frequent bullhead fishlings, freshwater shrimps, orb shell cockles, pond snails, caddis, and mayfly

Half a mile south west of the race course, hidden away on the steep bank of one of the stream's tributaries, is a maiden English Oak (TQ 355 148). It has a girth of 3.66 spans and great limbs straddling the stream. The stream's banks at that point are covered in ramsons, bluebells and moschatel.

In late 2016 the lower Plumpton Mill Stream and the whole of the Bevern Stream below her were polluted by a huge volume of slurry from Plumpton College Dairy Unit. All the fish in the affected streams were killed. The streams and their wildlife are still recovering.[8]

The Bevern is fed by the clear chalky waters of Plumpton Mill Stream arising at moated Plumpton Place. There are crossings and short accessible bank lengths all the way west past Plumpton Green.

The south of the parish rises to the top of the Downs and the slope forms part of Clayton to Offham Escarpment, which is a Site of Special Scientific Interest. There are a number of interesting and historic sites within this area of the parish.

On the scarp, there are three clusters of round barrows on each of the three main spurs that jut forward. They are likely to have been built by Bronze Age farmers. Most of the barrows are not obvious, but there is one that is a yard tall on an arable field just south of the South Downs Way and just west of Novington Plantation (TQ 364 125). Most of them have 'pillage dimples' in their tops where erstwhile treasure hunters or predatory antiquarians dug them out.[9]

The Plumpton bostal (TQ 360 128) rises from the Half Moon Inn. It was an army road in the Second World War taking vehicles to the training grounds on the plateau, so it has been concreted. It looks down over a stretch of scarp with a good assemblage of Down pasture flowers. It is still owned by Brighton Council, though leased to Plumpton College. At the base of the scarp the woodland is relatively rich in species, with bluebells and ramsons.

Bridleway to Plumpton

The earthworks on Plumpton Plain is a Scheduled Monument designated in 1933.[10] Most of this landscape has been since been ploughed, but at the top of a gentle valley (TQ 357 121), about four hundred metres south of the South Downs escarpment, there is evidence of Bronze Age settlements from about 3600 to 2900 years ago. These were the first people in Britain to organise a settled agriculture, based on the use of the ox plough, with sharp land divisions and long-lived nucleated settlements. What is remarkable about Plumpton Plain place is that there are bumps and hollows which mark the famers' house sites, house ponds, farm paths and even the earliest ridge and furrow cultivation traces to be found in southern England.[11]

One enclosure, still covered in scrub, lies to the west of the bridlepath running southwards from the South Downs Way. Four more, to the east of the bridlepath, are under pasture but can still be seen with the use of a site plan, as are the field paths and banks. On the wooded valley sides to the south east there are other house sites and field lynchets.[9]

There is a lot of evidence of the tools that the Bronze Age people used and it is relatively easy to find an axe head. The archeologist, David McOmish, when uncovering these settlements found a complete Neolithic flint axe, twenty-six centimetres long.[11]

To the south of Plumpton Plain is a 100-foot cross carved into the chalk, probably made by the monks of St Pancras Priory in Lewes, following the battle there in 1264 (below). The cross is no longer white, but to the knowledgeable eye it is still visible due to its lighter-coloured grass. It can be seen from a distance of several miles when the sun is low and the depression is in shadow.[12]

Faulkner's Bottom (TQ 352 116) has evidence of the field systems of the Bronze Age settlements found in Plumpton Plain. Most of the visible signs of those people have been ploughed out, but on the west side of Faulkner's Bottom two Bronze Age enclosures survive, as well as an undated 'valley entrenchment' crossed by a terrace way at the head of the valley (TQ 352 125). This rectangular enclosure is atmospheric, with old thorn bushes, bracken and rosebay glades, and with some scrub oaks. There is a long strip along the steep eastern valleys where archaic Down pastures still survive. There are orchids, dropwort, lousewort, centaury and hogweed testifying to little management and occasional cattle grazing. At its southern end laurel, spruce, pine and cypress has been planted (TQ 355 112) presumably to keep the pheasants reared there happy.[9]