Albourne Street (TQ 264 165) has a series of very fine old houses, often timber framed, at its south end, such as Gallops (an old timber building, and the oldest building in the village), and The Pound now owned by Brighton & Hove Albion footballer Garry Nelson, which was used to impound straying animals.

In the heart of the village is Woodbine Cottage, childhood home of James Starley, the pioneer of the different gear used on early bicycles, whose success brought prosperity of Coventry.

[6] Church Lane runs west out of Albourne and takes you down past some veteran oak trees, past the old school, over the stream to the tiny church, St. Bartholomew, (TQ 256 161) and grand rectory, which has yellow winter aconites flowers and snowdrops on the lawn in January.

The area is a sheltered tangle of tiny fields and streams, squelchy plats, dry banks and slopes, bushes and mature oaks.

[7] To the north and west of Church Lane the Low Wealden countryside of hedges and oaks is relatively well preserved.

[8] Truslers Hill Lane runs north to south on the western boundary of the parish with Woodmancote used to be lined by series of County Council smallholdings, but they were sold to private owners.

In early medieval times this was a lonely countryside of commons, marshes and woods and paths needing many markers as they tracked across house-less wastes for long distances.

It is thought that the brutal assassination of Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Becket in 1170 could have been plotted there by Ranulph and Robert de Broc in answer to Henry II's wishes.

In contrast, it is thought to have also played a part in saving the life of a later Archbishop of Canterbury, William Juxon, a supporter of Charles I, who is believed to have hidden from Cromwell's army by posing as a bricklayer at Albourne.

[7] The Roman trunk road now called the Sussex Greensand Way, links all the fertile scarp foot farmlands from Pulborough to Barcombe, and was engineered to a high its 'agger' (raised camber) are still visible in Shaves Wood.

The Duke of Burgundy fritillary is gone from all the Weald, disappearing from its Shipley and Itchingfield sites in the 1970s, to be finally extirpated at Shaves Wood in 1985.