[3] There are two public houses, The Bull and The White Horse; two cafes, The Nutmeg Tree and The Green Welly; a post office, florist, delicatessen and other shops.

Ditchling Common, north of the village, is one of jewels in the crown of the low weald and the source of the eastern River Adur.

The suffix -ing is a cognate of inge, an ethnonym for the Ingaevones said variously to mean "of Yngvi,"[12] "family, people or followers of"[13] or a genitive plural form of an inhabitant appellation.

The land passed through several hands until in 1435 it was owned by the Marquess of Abergavenny who held it until the 20th century, when it was sold to developers who failed to get planning permission to build on it.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the Old Meeting House in Ditchling was an important centre for Baptists from the wider area, whose records and memorandum books allow a unique insight into a small rural religious community of the period.

In the 1960s, Ditchling's tithe barn was dismantled and moved to Loughton, where it now forms the Corbett Theatre on the University of Essex campus there.

[citation needed] In the 2017 novel Rabbitman, by Michael Paraskos, the village was the setting for a Catholic Worker anarchist commune in an imagined post-Brexit dystopia.

[16] The second site is Clayton to Offham Escarpment, which stretches from Hassocks in the west, passing through many parishes including Ditchling, to Lewes in the East.

Ditchling Common is the very best of these assets and still holds an extraordinary assemblage of wildlife which thrive on the damp Weald Clay grasslands.

Ditchling has only retained its historic integrity thanks to the fierce defence by its residents, who have thwarted a bypass scheme and various built developments.

At Keymer, the Tileworks Clay Pit is now lost to housing development, but it was once a place where "searchers on hands and knees found the teeth of miniature crocodiles and the scales of swampland fish".

Their extensive grounds includes a big retirement village which squeezes the common and brings the urban world that little bit closer.

The field has meadow vetchling, oval and false fox sedge and are surrounded by ditches full of fleabane, meadowsweet and rushes, important archaic local plants.

The fields west of, and adjacent to The Nye (TQ 330 145) used to be rich in damp-loving valuable fen meadow plants, like sneezewort and pepper saxifrage, but the traditional pastures have been converted to hard-grazed horse paddocks.

In springtime drifts of Cowslips cover large parts, and, later on, there is abundant yellow rattle, ribwort plantain, knapweed, oxeye daisy and meadow barley.

It is an ancient woodland with wild service and big old trees, but it is open and mown on its south side where the graveyard of the nuns from St George's Retreat is located.

Jointer Copse (TQ 327 144) sits on Gault Clay and is a wet wood of young hazel coppice under old ash stools.

You will also find in the woodland goldilocks buttercup, redcurrants, meadowsweet and angelica to complement the spring bluebells, ramsons and anemones, and the midland thorn and early dog violet.

The southern half, south of Folders Lane East, is managed by the Commoners Association, and there you can still see great egg yellow sheets of dyer's greenweed in early summer.

[25] The south of the parish rises to the top of the Downs, and the scarp slope forms part of the Clayton to Offham Escarpment Site of Special Scientific Interest.

These Ditchling Downs were one of the last surviving local landscapes mantled by a unitary cover of ancient flowery chalk grassland.

Many areas of species-rich ancient grassland do survive, however, both on the scarp and in the dip slope 'Bottoms', though they carry too great a cover of invasive thorn scrub.

At 813 ft (248 metres) Ditchling Beacon (TQ 331 130) is the highest point on the eastern Downs and offers far-reaching views across the Sussex Weald.

Along Burnhouse Bostal, the red listed birds of high conservation concern, spotted flycatcher, bred in 2021 indicating the importance of the SSSI.

The old flint farmhouse and cottages were destroyed by Canadian forces during the Second World War, when these Downs were a military training ground.

Juniper was here until the 1930s and ling heather, signifier of these clay-with-flints soils, is still present at the top slope, although it risks being swamped by surrounding Gorse.

Bangs describes the view, "Dry grass bends before the breeze and betony, harebell, rampion and hawkbit colour-up the ground like a Turkish carpet".

[27] Dencher Bottom (TQ 317 125) is unimproved and somewhat heathy ancient pasture, and its large old anthills speckle the valley slopes.

Across both slopes, eighteen species of fungi have been recorded including fairy clubs, pinkgills, crimson waxcap and scarlet hood.

The common included most of Ditchling Beacon's Iron Age hill fort and the heads of three dry valleys (North, Home and Hogtrough Bottom), two of which retain their rich old Down pastures.