The Sompting Downs Barn 

The Sompting Estate Downs Barn is used for farm meetings and as a practical and farm heritage base by Estate trustees and staff.  The yard is managed as a flower-rich haymeadow, with hay passed over the flint wall into the field for our pedigree Sussex cattle.  We also make it available to local landscape heritage groups (Worthing Archaeol.Soc, Pastfinders) and organizations promoting farm or environmental education and welfare.     

Members of the public can book places on some environment education events, put on by organizations such as Sussex Wildlife Trust.  Details can be found on this site's Courses and Events page. If you would like to ask a question, or send feedback, please use the Contact page.

Click here for Courses & Events

Click here for info on Hiring the Downs Barn
 

Why the Downs Barn's setting is so special

The Sompting Estate’s downland has some wooded hillsides like those of the western downs, and also bare 'whale-backed' hills like the eastern downs.  It has gentle slopes running down towards the sea, and also some steep scarp slopes echoing those on the Wealden edge a little to the north.

The setting of the Downs Barn is an ancient and lovely landscape, and a microcosm of the landscape of the South Downs as a whole.  The distant white cliffs of Seaford Head can be seen from the Downs Barn, in the gap between the wooded hills of the Mountain and Lancing Clump.  Nearby are Cissbury and Chanctonbury rings, and the Steyning Bowl: from any of these, you can look either north to the blue plain of the Weald, or south to the blue sea. 

History of the Downs Barn

The Downs Barn (originally Coombe Barn) was built in the early 1800s.  The site comprised a threshing barn (which blew down in the Great Storm of 1987), a yard, and a small side barn. 

In the threshing barn, grain from surrounding farmland, grown with manure from the downland sheep, was stored after harvest.  Through the winter it was then threshed, to separate the grain from the straw, by a labourer using a hand flail (a pair of wooden sticks joined by a leather hinge). 

The grain would be taken to the mill, and cattle fed on the straw as it was put out into the yard.  The side barn, which is now the Downs Barn, gave shelter from the rain for cattle, wooden carts, etc, and was also useful for calving and lambing.

If you click on this link you can read about how the Sompting Downs Barn was used in the traditional farming of the surrounding fields, how it was converted and how it is used now. 

New life for old barns 

The old side barn was no longer suitable for mechanical farming operations and so it was converted in 2008. As far as practical, natural and local materials were used, and the historic structure was kept visible inside.  There is a built-in nestbox usually occupied by little owls or barn owls.  The costs of converting and equipping the barn were assisted by a 15% grant from the Sustainable Development Fund of the South Downs Joint Committee (which preceded the National Park Authority).  The yard was sown with chalk grassland meadow flowers which attract numerous butterflies.  A round concrete lid near the north end of the barn is said to mark the site of the famous Sompting Treacle Mine, although in historical times it was used as a water tank.  

The Estate family's memorial trees at the Downs Barn

Near the south end of the barn is the ancient barnyard dewpond, restored with grant assistance from the South Downs Society; a whitebeam tree near the pond commemorates the present trustees' parents David and Rosemary Tristram.  Rosemary and David died in 2019 and 2020, and are buried together at St Marys Church Sompting.