The pond sits at the centre of Buriton, spring-fed and large enough that the stream leaving it has somewhere to go. Behind it, wooded slopes climb sharply toward the open downs. That is the shape of the place: houses gathered on the Greensand terrace at the foot of the South Downs scarp, water in front and chalk behind.
The Nest is where you eat, and where you stay if you want to. It has fourteen bedrooms and a bar pouring local Flower Pots ales, sparkling wine from Hambledon Vineyard and coffee roasted in Winchester. The kitchen changes its menu monthly and leans on Hampshire produce; ribeye steak, Sunday roast and pizza are the fixtures, and almost everything is or can be made gluten-free. Dogs are welcome on the terrace but not inside, and the hotel offers packed lunches — ask at check-in. That last detail tells you what the place is for.
The village's other pub, the Five Bells, stands closed and up for sale. During the Second World War its garage became a kitchen for American troops and its rooms an officers' mess; when they left, the landlady, Mary Carter, found blankets, a ham and tins of food stacked in a cupboard.
For provisions there is the Post Office, which opens on Friday mornings in the Seward Room at St Mary's Church — worth checking the hours before you go. Alongside stamps and banking it sometimes sells local meat and sausages, olive oil and Buriton tea towels, and puts out free tea, coffee and biscuits for anyone who lingers.
St Mary's is worth the few minutes it takes. The nave is 12th-century, and inside it stands a square font of Purbeck stone from the same period, raised on five columns; the chancel arch is an open timber frame, which is rare. Somewhere in the churchyard, in an unmarked grave, lies John Goodyer, the 17th-century botanist who first sorted out the four main kinds of British elm and left his library to Magdalen College.
Walking is what draws people here. The Hangers Way runs straight through: two and a half miles north to Petersfield across small fields and shallow valleys, or the same distance south to Queen Elizabeth Country Park, passing beneath War Down and its seven Bronze Age burial mounds. From the pond, the Shipwrights Way climbs about three hundred metres through the old chalk pits before joining the South Downs Way — steep, but with no stiles or gates the whole five miles from Petersfield.
Those pits were a working quarry from around 1860, when B. J. Forder began burning chalk for lime and shifting it on narrow-gauge railways; the work went on for over seventy years, until the Second World War. The ground is a nature reserve now, the old rail beds turned to footpaths and chalk-grassland flowers moved back in. Come in spring and the slopes carry violets, primroses, cowslips and bluebells, with wild orchids later on the chalk.
Edward Gibbon lived at Buriton Manor for much of the later 18th century. When the railway works began in 1853 and the opening ceremony drew a crowd, the Portsmouth Times reported the place "frightened out of its peacefulness."
Families have a recreation ground with a playground, goalposts, a basketball backboard and a tennis club, and Queen Elizabeth Country Park a short walk south, with a café, a visitor centre and an adventure play trail. Petersfield, two and a half miles off on the main line, is the nearest station, with step-free access, taxis and cycle storage; the A3 runs just to the west.
Once a year the village used to fill with hop-pickers up from Portsmouth. They camped near the Maple Inn, the local children were let out of school to help, and the dried hops went back to the city by train.