The White Horse sits at the foot of the Downs. It is a refurbished country inn with rooms, a spacious garden and outdoor seating for the summer. The kitchen has a name for its food and leans on what is local and in season. A Scotch egg, Sunday lunch and daily specials are the mainstays, and diners have recently mentioned an asparagus tart, scallops, pork tenderloin and steaks.
Three cask beers are usually on: Langham Best, Langham Hip Hop and Butcombe Original. Dogs are welcome through most of the interior, the bar, parts of the dining room, the garden and some of the bedrooms, and the staff put out bowls, treats and towels. On Sundays the pub runs a dog stroll from the door, lunch afterwards for anyone who wants it.
The building was an 18th-century coaching house. In 2009 a £4 million conversion turned it into the Fish House, a seafood hotel with an oyster display and aquaria set into the dining room. It has since gone back to being the White Horse.
Chilgrove has no shop, butcher or bakery to speak of. What the valley has produced instead is a gin. Christopher and Celia Beaumont-Hutchings conceived Chilgrove vodka here, and the Signature Edition that followed is a London dry gin built from grape alcohol and eleven botanicals — wild water mint, grains of paradise, citrus peel — cut with mineral water filtered through the chalk of the surrounding downs. The Bramble Edition adds whole English blackberries to twelve.
The hamlet is spread out across the valley among woodland, farms and the chalk foothills, and the walking is the other reason to stay. Two loops start and finish at the White Horse: one to Hooksway through woods, fields and downland, two to three hours at a moderate pace; the other climbing to a short stretch of the South Downs Way before dropping back, an hour and a half to two.
Further out is Kingley Vale, one of the finest yew forests in western Europe, where veteran trees pass five hundred years and five metres round. "Kingley Vale is like walking onto a movie set of The Lord of the Rings," says Jeff Travis of the South Downs National Park. The Hidden Landscape Trail runs 4.4 miles over about three hours across steep, uneven ground, linking the ancient yews with Goosehill Camp and the Bronze Age barrows called the Devil's Humps. Dogs stay on leads here, for the livestock and the wildlife, and the phone signal is poor. For a gentler visit, the level approach from West Stoke car park reaches the reserve entrance in about three-quarters of a mile, fifteen minutes or so; thirty-nine of England's fifty-eight breeding butterfly species have been recorded on the grassland.
People have farmed this valley a long time. Beneath and beside a Roman villa at Chilgrove lies an Iron Age farmstead, and the villa's fourth-century mosaic and a small statue of Fortuna, recognisable by the rudder and globe at her leg, are now in the Novium in Chichester, seven miles south on the B2141 by way of Lavant. The parish church, St Andrew's, is at West Dean rather than here; Chilgrove's own chapel was pulled down between 1618 and 1636 and survives only below ground beside Chapel Lane.
Chichester has the cathedral, Pallant House and the shops; Goodwood and its racecourse are close, and West Dean Gardens and the Weald & Downland museum — where The Repair Shop is filmed — are a short drive. But the day tends to end back at the White Horse, boots off, dog asleep under the table, the Downs going dark through the window.