Ditchling Beacon itself stands some eight hundred and fifty feet above the sea and is the highest point in all the range of the South Downs, though it lacks the nobility of Chanctonbury.  The earthworks here are irregular and not very well defined, but there is a fine dewpound to the east of the camp though perhaps this has not much antiquity, a seemingly older depression now dry in the north-west corner is rather an old rainwater ditch than a dewpound.  Altogether it might seem that Ditchling Camp was rather a refuge for cattle than a military fortress.

Ditchling village is charming, with more than one old half-timber house, and the church of St Margaret’s is not only interesting in itself, but, standing as it does upon rising ground and yet clear of the great hills, it offers you one of the finest views of the Downs anywhere to be had from the Weald.  It consists of a cruciform building of which the north transept and the north wall of the nave were rebuilt in the thirteenth century.  The chancel, however, has some beautiful Early English work to show and the nave is rather plain Transitional.  The eastern window and most of the windows in the nave are of the early Decorated period, the window in the south chancel aisle being somewhat later.

Something better than Ditchling church awaits the traveller at Clayton where the little church of St John the Baptist possesses a most interesting chancel arch, round and massive, that may well be Saxon.  The chancel itself is of the thirteenth century with triple lancets at the western end with two heads, perhaps of a king and queen on the moulding.  Here, too, on the south chancel wall is a fine brass of 1523 in which we see a priest holding chalice and wafer.  In the nave are the remains of frescoes of the Last Judgment.

Right above Clayton rises Wolstanbury, a hill-top camp or circular work some two hundred and fifty yards in diameter.  It is interesting because it is curiously and cleverly fortified, the rampart being built up below and outside the fosse, owing to the steepness of the hill.  To the left are certain pits which may have been the site of dwellings; certainly many neolithic implements have been found here.

Below Wolstanbury which thrusts itself out into the Weald like a great headland nearly seven hundred feet in height, lies Pyecombe to the south-west.  This little place which lies between the heights of Wolstanbury and Newtimber Hill is celebrated for two things, its shepherds’ crooks and the Norman font of lead in the little church whose chancel arch is Norman too.  You may see here even in so small a place, however, all the styles of England, for if the font and chancel arch are Norman, the lancets in the chancel are Early English, the double piscina is Decorated and the windows of the nave are Perpendicular while the pulpit is of the seventeenth century.

Pyecombe is hard to reach from Clayton without a great climb over the Downs, but there is a way, though a muddy one, which turns due west out of the Brighton road where the railway crosses it.  This leads one round the northern side of Wolstanbury (and this is the best way from which to visit the camp on the top) and so by a footpath past Newtimber Place, a moated Elizabethan house well hidden away among the trees west of the road to Hurstpierpoint.