The old village well in the middle of The Square was refurbished in 2000. The village sits in a shallow chalk valley between Telegraph Hill to the east and Compton Down to the west, with farmland and beechwoods rising in every direction. You have come here to walk, and the village is arranged to let you.
Darcy's Tea Room stands on The Square and does the work of two places at once, a family-run tearoom and the village shop. It serves homemade cakes and cookies, cooked breakfasts, light bites and afternoon tea, with freshly made tea and coffee and a specials board that changes daily. The shop side carries local and branded groceries, and both the tearoom and the shop welcome dogs and children.
The Coach & Horses on the same Square is closed. A former coaching inn that has stood since the 16th century and has been an inn since the 1660s, it reopened after restoration in 2022 and is now shut long-term, marketed on a new lease, so do not plan an evening around it. A century ago the village supported more: a butcher, a second shop, and a place called Cobbys that sold boots, clothes and lino alongside home-cured bacon, home-baked bread, sweets and cream from its own cows.
St Mary's church is principally 13th century, listed Grade II*, though a blocked north arcade and a waterleaf capital survive from the late 12th century and much of what you see followed a heavy restoration in 1849. The walls are flint with stone dressings under a tiled roof, and a weatherboarded bell turret carries a shingled spire at the west end. Inside are a 15th-century trefoil-headed piscina, a plain octagonal font, and an organ by H. Willis & Son installed in 1970.
The walking is the point. From the Recreation Ground, about two hundred yards south of The Square on the B2146, there is free parking and a choice of routes with no stiles on any of them. The three-mile climb to Telegraph Hill is a long gentle pull with a level hilltop stretch, passing Telegraph House and Bevis's Thumb and opening out towards Uppark and the south coast. A similar distance west takes you over undulating downland and through the sheltered West Hanger Wood onto Compton Down, with views reaching to Portsmouth, the Spinnaker Tower and the Isle of Wight. A longer 5.9-mile circular loops out through North Marden and Up Marden on exposed tracks with almost no road walking.
Bevis's Thumb, out between Fernbeds Down and Telegraph Hill, is an early Neolithic long barrow around sixty metres long, among the longest in south-east England. Telegraph Hill earned its name from a semaphore station built in 1821, the twelfth of fifteen relaying Admiralty signals between London and Portsmouth from 1822 until 1847. Telegraph House stands on the site now and is a private home.
Compton reaches a long way back. It appears in King Alfred's will, and the Domesday surveyors of 1086 recorded twenty-eight households here, one of them a priest, on its main holding, valued at eight pounds. On the downs at Apple Down, metal-detector finds in the 1980s led to the excavation of a mixed-rite pagan cemetery in use from the late fifth to the seventh century.
Getting here is easiest on Stagecoach route 54, which links the village with Chichester, South Harting, Rogate and Petersfield station Monday to Saturday; there is currently no Sunday service, so check times before you travel. The same route stops at the gates of Uppark, the National Trust house up the B2146, whose scented borders and meadow are free to walk. On VE Day in 1945, one resident remembered, "that night the square was alight with blazing torches and the dancing went on until the early hours."