The village is to the west of the River Ouse, Sussex and has a church dedicated to Saint Peter.

Southease railway station lies roughly a kilometre east over the river and may be reached via a swing bridge.

The church has one of only three round towers in Sussex, all of which are located in the Ouse Valley and all three built in the first half of the 12th century.

It is downstream of Lewes, the county town of East Sussex and upstream of Piddinghoe and Newhaven.

The remains of a slipway on the west bank of the Ouse just north of the bridge faces Mount Caburn.

The South Downs Way winds its way through the village towards the nearby River Ouse and the railway station.

[6] The village is noted in the Domesday Book of 1086 as comprising 60 households, a significant settlement at the time.

[4] In the 11th to 13th centuries drainage of the river allowed more crops to be grown, but subsequent flooding led to more reliance on fishing.

Telscombe peasants always shared common rights with Southease over their brooklands, and the two manors were both owned by Winchester's Hyde Abbey for nearly 600 years from Saxon times until the Reformation.

[4] There was also a Prisoner-of-war camp containing 16 Nissen huts near the northern farm, the concrete bases of which are still visible.

[4] The body of the writer Virginia Woolf was found on 18 April 1941, at Asham Wharf on the east bank of the Ouse, to the north of the bridge, after her suicide by drowning on 28 March.

[14][15] Parts of Rock Cottage are 16th century, making it the oldest remaining dwellings in the village.

[16] The late 18th century threshing barn, on the southern boundary, is the dominant feature in views of the village from the South.

To the north of the lane to Southease Bridge, the pastures are designated as part of the Lewes Brooks SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest), although the ditches both there and to the south of the Bridge are heavily dominated by Reed, Phragmites australis, at the expense of the much wider range of plants and freshwater invertebrates that occurred until modern times.

To the north, between the Southease Road and Cricketing Bottom, is a broad-backed sheep-grazed slope, with scattered gorse and thorn brakes.

After the war it suffered from the farmer applying agrochemicals there and it is still recovering, but you can find harebells and cowslips flowers in summer and butter waxcap fungi, Hygrocybe ceracea, in autumn and one steep part of the slope (TQ 414 047) survived the chemical peril, and the old Down pasture herbs and insects are intact in this area.

To the north is a bushy chalk grassland bank (TQ 420 044) with spotted orchid and cowslips, round-headed rampion and dropwort.

The election on 12 May 2015 elected a Liberal Democrat[31] East Sussex County Council is the next tier of government, for which Southease is within the Newhaven and Ouse Valley West division, with responsibility for Education, Libraries, Social Services, Civil Registration, Trading Standards and Transport.

The Liberal Democrat Norman Baker served as the constituency MP from 1997 until 2015, when Conservative Maria Caulfield was elected.

Prior to Brexit in 2020, Southease was part of the South East England constituency in the European Parliament.