Plumpton is mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086 as having a church and two mills, and is shown as Pluntune, meaning 'town or settlement where plum-trees grew'.

[4] The Clayton to Offham Escarpment is a Site of Special Scientific Interest along the ridge and slopes of the South Downs.

Plumpton Green is essentially a ribbon development immediately to the north of the railway station and is home to the school, the village shop, a church and two pubs.

Westgate was built on farmland some years later (1995) incorporating mainly detached houses and also the new village hall and green.

Meetings draw large crowds and on race days the population of Plumpton doubles and the rail service is supplemented with extra trains.

Archaic vegetation survives in the front churchyard and has lots of common spotted orchid amongst oxeye daisy, sorrel, bugle, meadow foxtail, ladies smock and thale cress.

The pub was originally sited by Bower Farm but was relocated to the crossroads when the airfield was built in the second world war.

In the early 1970s, Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page purchased Plumpton Place, an Elizabethan manor, with 20th-century alterations by Sir Edwin Lutyens, surrounded by a moat and extensive gardens.

The manor can be seen briefly near the beginning of the Led Zeppelin concert film, The Song Remains the Same where the camera walks up to Page, playing a hurdy-gurdy, to inform him of the North American tour dates.

Until then, the dairy cows had been hand-milked, and the land had received no artificial fertilisers since 1945, thus facilitating immediate organic status.

It has remarkably varied vegetation, which includes a thick bluebell carpet in springtime, oak and ash standards, a gean swarm, wild service and pignut.

[7] The northern Plumpton Wood stands on Weald Clay (TQ 365 185) and is equally remarkable, although about 40% has been cleared in modern times and has chunks bitten out of it by houses and gardens.

There is wych elm and wild service, spurge laurel and midland thorn, and in 2011 green hellebore, birdsnest and greater butterfly orchids were recorded.

The chalk stream has frequent bullhead fishlings, freshwater shrimps, orb shell cockles, pond snails, caddis, and mayfly Half a mile south west of the race course, hidden away on the steep bank of one of the stream's tributaries, is a maiden English Oak (TQ 355 148).

The south of the parish rises to the top of the Downs and the slope forms part of Clayton to Offham Escarpment, which is a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

These were the first people in Britain to organise a settled agriculture, based on the use of the ox plough, with sharp land divisions and long-lived nucleated settlements.

The archeologist, David McOmish, when uncovering these settlements found a complete Neolithic flint axe, twenty-six centimetres long.

[11] To the south of Plumpton Plain is a 100-foot cross carved into the chalk, probably made by the monks of St Pancras Priory in Lewes, following the battle there in 1264 (below).

[12] Faulkner's Bottom (TQ 352 116) has evidence of the field systems of the Bronze Age settlements found in Plumpton Plain.

Most of the visible signs of those people have been ploughed out, but on the west side of Faulkner's Bottom two Bronze Age enclosures survive, as well as an undated 'valley entrenchment' crossed by a terrace way at the head of the valley (TQ 352 125).

The ward also includes Chailey itself, Ditchling, East Chiltington, Newick, St John Without, Streat, Westmeston and Wivelsfield.

He gained a strategic advantage, and achieved complete surprise, by using a night march to position his numerically inferior army on Downland high above the town by early morning.

To avoid detection they ascended the Downs four miles to the north-west of Lewes up Warningore Bostal, a deeply-worn track that exists to this day.

Before marching on the town de Montfort is reputed to have rallied his forces, wearing large white crosses on their tunics for identification, on Plumpton Plain.

The place name 'Lentridge' Farm perhaps denotes the more widespread ancient presence of small-leaved lime, which is rare now in the Weald.

[7] Schooling began in 1837, where two teachers taught in a small building (measuring 22×16' – 6.7×4.9m) in the south of the parish in Plumpton village.

Apart from brick-making and farming there were other rural activities such as bird-scaring, hare-coursing, acorn-picking, horse-driving, steeplechasing; even collecting flowers for the May Day celebrations.The 1870 Education Act introduced compulsory education and during 1875 the newly formed Plumpton School Board approached a total of six local landowners to sell a half-acre plot for the building of the school.

The threat of compulsory purchase finally procured, for £250, a corner of a meadow bordered by a stream 200m north of the railway and in 1877 building commenced on a large single schoolroom, surmounted by a prominent bell-tower, with adjoining three-bedroomed house for the schoolmaster.

The redundant old school building had a number of community uses and then became a private residence until, in the late 1980s, with the addition of three new cottages it was converted into a total of seven dwellings.

The cricket club is one of the most successful village teams in the area consistently winning both the Mid Sussex League and the Wisdom Cup.