Imogen Lycett Green on ancient Sussex: #5 Alciston church.

Sussex is crawling with traffic. Brighton beach is awash with collapsed revellers, Alfriston’s high street is humming with lost Europeans, French and Italian, drawn by Olga Polizzi, bemused by the absolute absence of ‘summer’ in England. It is raining. You just returned from a family holiday in Cornwall (also raining) where you dragged 17 reluctant children and their grandfather plus a badminton set, boules and 48 bacon sandwiches down a steep cliff covered in wet bracken onto a windswept beach. Everyone cried hard as the sand stung their faces. You are so nearly home, but the A27 is almost at a standstill, caravans bumper to bumper, the Downs so green, so tempting, so clear.

Turn up any one of those lanes leading to the Downs from the A27, and you’ll leave the 21st century behind. Folkington, Wilmington, Lullington, Berwick, Firle. Their ancient names are full of stories, their churches full of names and plaques and memorial stones. But of all the downland villages, Alciston feels the most untouched, and its church, hidden by trees on its circular mound enclosed with flint walls, the most mythical. What remains here is not the earliest church in Sussex, nor the smallest, nor the most architecturally perfect. Nor is it, in fact, untouched. A pre-Conquest apse made of chalk blocks was discovered by archaeologists in 1984, and the subsequent Norman chancel has been added to, repaired and restored many times. But still it invites you in.

Its history is written on helpful notices. With earlier, Saxon, origins, Alciston is recorded in the Domesday Book as Alistone, an estate of 50 hides and 28 ploughs belonging to the monks of Battle Abbey. Where faint terraces, just visible, nod to ancient vines and three fishponds, piebald ponies now graze. An aerial view shows the church hugged by red brick and flint farm buildings, a 14th-century dovecote and a 16th-century tithe barn. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Alciston was given to Sir John Gage in return for a ‘knight’s fee’, that is for providing horses and riders for the King’s service. The Benedictine monks have made ‘scratch dials’ on the exterior walls of the church, but inside there are only two plaques, one to a church warden and the other in brass to local men lost in war. There is a list of the vicars going back to 1353, but we just don’t know who whispered what to whom in this church, or who held whose hand, or who knelt and wept, or who stood up and sang.

There is a pilgrim’s bell here, as Alciston is one of seven Sussex churches on the ‘Cuckmere Pilgrim Path’, a twelvemile circular walk from Alfriston. Ring the bell, and sit. The church’s high wooden rafters are strong as a ship’s timbers, its warm brick floor worn and polished by hundreds and thousands of feet. Unlike nearby Berwick, excessively decorated by those people who couldn’t stop painting things, Alciston is unadorned. Through clear-paned lead lattice windows – one of them a tiny Norman stone arch in the chancel – the church’s chalky white, uneven walls are illuminated gently. There are plain wooden pews, a modest pulpit. The stillness is palpable. There is warmth and light, which is somehow elevating. Sit alone and you’ll find a certain kind of solitariness here, one in which you feel accompanied. Not by spirits, or God, necessarily, unless you want to invite him in, but by Time itself, a kind of continuity and clarity which renders you part of things.

Afterwards, blinking into the day, wander through the churchyard. There is so and so Nicholls, so and so Boys. All these buried people are suddenly your people, and by that very thought, the bacon sandwiches and the excessive traffic on the A27 are shared, rather than being just your drama, in your life.

Remember your John Donne?

When things pile up, we can forget that we are ‘involved in mankind’. Alciston church has the sense of place and quiet power to remind us.