The Town
The best way to begin a tour of Lewes from the train station, is to walk up Station Road, then left down the High Street. The town's Castle (Mon-Sat 10am-5.30pm, Sun 11am-5.30pm; winter closes at dusk; GBP4; ) is hidden from view behind the houses on your right. Inside the castle complex - unusual for being built on two mottes, or mounds - the shell of the eleventh-century keep remains, and both the towers can be climbed for excellent views over the town's roofs to the surrounding Downs. Tickets for the castle include admission to the museum (same hours as castle), by the castle entrance, which is much better than the usual stuffy town museum. The highlight is a half-hourly audio-visual history of Lewes, aided by the vast Lewes Living History Model on which places of interest within the town are spotlit as the tale unfolds. A few minutes' walk further west along the High Street past St Michael's Church, with its unusual twin towers - one arcaded and wooden and the other round flint - you come to the steep cobbled and much photographed Keere Street , down which the reckless Prince Regent is alleged to have driven his carriage. Keere Street leads eventually to Southover Grange (Mon-Sat 8am-dusk, Sun 9am-dusk; free), with its lovely gardens. Built in 1572 from the priory's remains, the Grange was also the childhood home of the diarist John Evelyn. Past the gardens, a right turn down Southover High Street leads to the Tudor-built Anne of Cleves House (mid-Feb to Oct Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; Nov & Dec Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; Jan to mid-Feb Tues, Thurs & Sat 10am-5pm; GBP2.60, combined ticket with the castle GBP5.50; ), given to her in settlement after her divorce from Henry VIII (although she never actually lived here) and now an absorbing museum. The magnificent oak-beamed Tudor bedroom is impressive, with its cumbersome "bed wagon", a bed-warming brazier which would fail the slackest of fire regulations and which the 400-year-old Flemish four-poster has managed to survive. The house's decor dates from the sixteenth century when the Wealden iron industry was flourishing and Sussex produced most of England's iron, with Lewes being a centre of cannon manufacture. On the opposite side of the road and closer to the train station, is the church of St John the Baptist , with its squat, brick tower capped by a six-foot shark for a weather vane; inside there's some superb stained glass and a tiny chapel with the lead coffins of William de Warenne and his wife Gundrada, William I's daughter. De Warenne was one of the six barons presiding over the new administrative provinces - known as the Rapes of Sussex - created by the Normans soon after the Conquest. Behind the church are the ruins of de Warenne's St Pancras Priory , once one of Europe's principal Cluniac institutions, with a church the size of Westminster Abbey. Sadly it was dismantled to build town houses following the Dissolution and is now an evocative ruin surrounded by playing fields. Returning to the town centre, the Star Brewery Studio off Fisher Street, north of the High Street, displays the creative talents of a collective of artists, bookbinders, carpenters and other artisans; the attached Star Gallery (Mon-Sat 10.30am-5.30pm; free) presents a changing series of exhibitions. At the east end of the High Street, School Hill descends towards Cliffe Bridge, built in 1727 and entrance to the commercial centre of the medieval settlement, although Cliffe High Street's appearance is now predominantly nineteenth century. For the energetic, a path leads up onto the Downs from the end of Cliffe High Street - site of England's worst avalanche disaster in 1836, when a bank of snow slid onto Cliffe village, killing eight people. The path passes close to an obelisk, commemorating the town's seventeen Protestant martyrs.
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