Ticehurst

Ticehurst

There is an active village club,which runs regular social events, and a monthly newsletter "News & Views" is produced by a team of volunteers. The village school serves both Ticehurst and Flimwell.^[9] There is also a comprehensive website covering most of the activities in the community.

Ticehurst House Hospital (now part of the Priory Group) specialises in the treatment of psychiatric disorders and is located in the village. Samuel Newington opened the original Ticehurst House in 1792 as a place dedicated to the care and treatment of psychiatric illness.^[10]

Bookshop

In the centre of Ticehurst there is a dry cleaner, hairdresser, greengrocer, chemist, Indian takeaway, car salesroom, car repairer and MOT centre, general village shop (incorporating a post office), model shop, estate agency, a bank (National Westminster), two antique furniture dealers and two pubs, the Chequers Inn & the Bell Inn Hotel (which reopened in 2012 following a complete refurbishment), the Greedy Goat Cafe, a fishmonger and locally reared meat supplier at The Fish Shed, and a café within Newington Court. A secondhand children's clothing shop called Merry Go Round opened in 2015. Artichoke Gallery opened in 2014.

From 1974 to July 2018 the village was home to the headquarters of the Antiquarian Horological Society, at New House, on the square.

The village is also home to the first pick-your-own fruit farm to open in Britain, Maynard's Fruit Farm, made The Times "Top 50 places to eat outside in Britain" list.^[11] Outside the village there are dairies at Northiam and Stonegate, a bakery at Bodium, family butcher in Etchingham, a smokery and two more pubs at Three Leg Cross and Dale Hill.

One claim to fame is that the Scottish singer/guitarist Bert Jansch lived in Ticehurst in the late 1960s and recorded tracks for his 1971 Rosemary Lane album at his house in the village.^[12] Ticehurst was also the final residence of Evelyn Waugh's first wife, Evelyn Nightingale.^[13] The village church, St Mary's, was the venue for the wedding of her son, the journalist and theatre critic Benedict Nightingale, to the author Anne Redmon.^[14]

Pashley Manor Gardens is promoted by the Historic Houses Association and by the Campaign to Protect Rural England.^[15] The gardens hold an annual tulip festival each spring. The event in 2016, between 22 April and 7 May, has 30,000 tulips, with over 100 varieties.^[16]

Flimwell

The village is linear in shape and is the largest of a group of settlements, some of which contain some large residential properties, to both west and east of the main road. Other settlements are Union Street and Dale Hill to the west, and Seacox Heath to the east. Including the surrounding woods and fields, Flimwell covers an area of approximately 860 acres (350 ha), of which only approximately 5% is built-up.

Stonegate

South-east from Ticehurst and due north-east from Burwash, is a small settlement, Stonegate.^[17]

It came into being at the same time as the railway line from Tunbridge Wells. The station at Stonegate has hourly train services to London (Charing Cross and Cannon Street) and to Hastings. The next stop from Stonegate to London is Wadhurst and towards Hastings is Etchingham.

In Stonegate, there is a Church of England primary school and the Anglican church of St Peter.^[18]