Welcome to Poynings Website

Poynings Village Fete
2009
The grand sum of £2,234 was raised, the best yet!
Click here for some pictures

Poynings - Place of the week on BBC Sussex
(formerly BBC Southern Counties Radio) 95.3 & 104.5 FM.

The Afternoon Show presenter, Jane Vickers, chose Poynings as her place of the week on 24 March. She enjoyed her walk in the sunshine around our picturesque village but wondered where to find a tea garden. Pam from Rushfields guessed the featured village was Poynings. Other locals were contacted by the programme, David spoke of his work at Opus Glass, the Royal Oak manager, Alex, was asked about his Food Pub Manager of the Year award. Mike was asked about his interest in environmental campaigning. Sheila spoke about her work as a children’s entertainer and the history of the village and Laura spoke of living in the village and selling chicken-feed from Mill House. The mill had been mentioned by Sheila who also promoted our village website www.poynings.net. Keep up to date and make your views known by visiting the site and discussion forum.

Thank you very much for supporting our Country Girls Calendar. It has done extremely well, raising over £10,000! We really appreciate the support of everyone to get to this amount.

You may have seen Sheila suspiciously lurking by the Pumpkin recently and if you weren't careful you may have ended up having you photo taken. Check here to see if you ended up in the Pumpkin Heads rogue gallery.

Poynings has a 14th century cruciform Church and if you look at the front of the porch you will see that it is made of flints so beautifully shaped that they fit together like bricks. In the Apex of the porch gable you can just see a carved shield which isn't mentioned in any guide books. The arms are those of the Poynings family. The brothers Thomas and Richard de Poynings built the church as it now stands in 1370. This coat of Arms can also be seen on the village sign opposite the church at Cora's corner. Cora's memory lingers here with the corner named after her and a walk, along which has a series of seats presented by the Emile Littler Foundation. There is also a pub, playing field, cricket pitch (which is well maintained by trained sheep), school/village hall and lots of interesting people.

South and uphill of Poynings is the Devil’s Dyke, a steep coombe, surmounted by an Iron Age fort and provides superb views of the South Downs westwards across to Chanctonbury ring and northwards over the Weald. A railway used to run here from Brighton until the late 1930's which was packed with hysterical day-trippers. A raised bank by the row of cottages below the hotel was the end of the line. If you look carefully, you can still find in the banks on either side of the Dyke, the footings of the structure which strung cable cars across the gulf around the turn of the century. A hundred yards to the east of the restaurant car park there is a slab of concrete for the funicular railway which shot down the steep slope to Poynings from 1897.

The Old School is now the village hall, and in the village centre nestles Glebe Cottage, constructed from flint, with a slate roof and tiny windows.

This is a community site so please visit it often and don't forget to add your views on our Forum. Especially the younger ones in the village (Must be over 1 month).

Even the wildlife are a bit strange!

I hope you will find this easy to use and will encourage more of you to give me some feedback, information and gossip!!

I make no apologies to shamelessly plagiarizing Sheila's hard work on the Newsletter, and all the other contributors.

Contact Colin at

On the left hand side you should see links to other parts of the site and some offsite links.

 ^Hits - 

This site is listed in the British Towns and Villages Encyclopaedia of Great Britain and we can be found in the entry for Poynings