Beauworth

The pub above the deep well

Inside the Milbury there is a wooden treadmill, once walked to draw water from a well that drops roughly three hundred feet, or about a hundred metres, into the chalk. The pub stands at the top of Millbarrow Down, where old tracks meet on ground that was a Bronze Age barrow cemetery before it was anything else. This is more or less the whole of Beauworth: a pub, a church, a village hall, a small green and a scatter of thatched cottages among farmland, about forty dwellings and a hundred people on the high Millbarrows Ridge in the South Downs.

The Milbury is the reason to come. It was formerly the Fox and Hounds, a mid-eighteenth-century building that Historic England lists at Grade II, and a refurbishment finished in 2023 left it with log fires, a gallery and a large garden of benches looking north over the hills. Clive and Tanith Cummings run it. The kitchen, under Mike Smollett, works from a seasonal sharing menu: Old Winchester rarebit on sourdough, ham-hock terrine, ChalkStream trout cured with River Test citrus gin, a seafood platter built around Brixham crab pâté, whole roasted bream, heritage pork loin, roasted lamb rump, a Hampshire watercress salad. There is no children's menu, though the kitchen will simplify some dishes. St Austell Tribute and Flower Pots Perridge Pale are the regular cask ales, with changing beers from Hop Back and Triple fff. Dogs are welcome.

Old tracks and an unusual church

The South Downs Way runs past the door, which is much of the appeal of staying here. The National Trail follows old droveways along the chalk for a hundred miles between Winchester and Eastbourne, open to walkers, cyclists and riders, and you can pick it up at the pub and turn back whenever you have had enough. A local eleven-mile circuit links Beauworth with Tichborne over mixed, gently rising ground if you want a full day of it.

The Church of St James stands beside the village hall. It is younger than it looks — built in 1838 for H. J. Mulcock, consecrated in 1841, a single-cell Early English church of rendered flint and brick. Its oddest feature is a three-stage slate-hung bell turret carried on cast-iron columns that also support the west gallery. The triple lancet windows and the exposed queen-post roof with its wavy cusps are all of a piece. An earlier chapel is thought to have stood near the manor and to have been pulled down in the sixteenth century, after the parish moved its worship to Cheriton in 1517.

Silver in a cart rut

Beauworth's other claim is a hoard. On a June day in 1833, four boys under the age of ten were playing marbles near the manor when one noticed metal glinting in a cart rut. They pulled silver coins from a broken lead container and took them for old buttons; some ended up thrown into the village pond before the adults arrived and the digging turned serious. The Beauworth Hoard is now reckoned at somewhere between eight and twelve thousand English silver pennies and cut halfpennies, of which 6,282 were recorded — among them a penny of William I struck at Lincoln. The Domesday clerks, for their part, lumped Beauworth in with Alresford and Soberton, so the figures they left cannot safely be assigned to Beauworth alone.

Beyond the village lanes

There is no shop and no playground. Winchester, six miles west, supplies the shops and services Beauworth lacks, and New Alresford four miles north has the Watercress Line if the weather turns and you want a train. Hinton Ampner, the National Trust house Ralph Dutton rebuilt after a 1960 fire, is close enough for an afternoon among its topiary and estate walks, and Old Winchester Hill, with its hillfort ramparts and burial mounds on species-rich chalk grassland, is a longer day out.

A parish that beats the bounds

The village hall and the church each seat about forty. Between them they hold the quizzes, suppers, harvest and candlelit carols, and at Rogation the parish still walks its boundaries and beats the bounds.