Lavant, West Sussex
civil parish in West Sussex, England
Lavant is a civil parish in the Chichester district of West Sussex, England, 2.2 miles (3.5 km) north of Chichester. It includes three villages: Mid Lavant and East Lavant, which are separate Anglican parishes, and the much smaller West Lavant. It takes its name from the River Lavant which flows from East Dean to Chichester.
The A286 road between Chichester and Midhurst runs through the parish.
The villages were served by a station in Mid Lavant, on the railway line that ran between Chichester and Midhurst, but this closed in stages between 1931 and 1991.
History
Prehistory
In 1993, the Lavant drum, a small Neolithic cylinder, was discovered during excavations at Chalk Pit Lane. It is one of only five known objects of its type, and the only one discovered outside of Yorkshire. (The other four are the three Folkton drums, discovered in 1889 in North Yorkshire, and the Burton Agnes drum, discovered in 2015 in East Yorkshire.) It has been suggested that these objects were tools used to measure cord to standard lengths which were used in the construction of monuments such as Stonehenge and the timber circle at Durrington Walls.
East Lavant
East Lavant was listed in the Domesday Book.
In 1861, the population of the parish (with West Lavant) was 421, and the area was 2,884 acres (1,167 ha).
“Lavant, West Sussex” enters the record as civil parish in West Sussex, England. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Lavant, West and Sussex can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Lavant, West Sussex” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Lavant, West and Sussex provides the most credible route into that argument.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q2396176. Authority coordinates are 50.872, -0.782. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1931, 1991, 1993 and 1889.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lavant, West Sussex” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.