Midhurst

Midhurst is a small market town in the heart of the South Downs National Park, sitting on the River Rother in West Sussex. Its centre is a tight cluster of timber-framed, tile-hung and Georgian buildings along Church Hill, Red Lion Street and the market square, with independent shops, tea rooms, antique dealers and old coaching inns. The Spread Eagle, dating from 1430, is one of the oldest inns in England still in use.

The town's headline attraction is the Cowdray Ruins on its eastern edge: the burnt-out shell of a great Tudor courtyard house that was one of the finest in southern England before fire destroyed it in 1793. You can walk to the ruins along a causeway across the water meadows, with views of the polo lawns of the Cowdray Estate beyond. H. G. Wells lived and worked in Midhurst as a young man, and the town appears in his novel Tono-Bungay.

Midhurst makes a natural base for walking. The South Downs Way passes a few miles to the south, and the Serpent Trail and New Lipchis Way both run through the town. The parish church of St Mary Magdalene and St Denis, the old Grammar School buildings and the wool-merchants' houses around Knockhundred Row are all worth a look on a slow wander through the centre.