The Three Horseshoes is East Worldham's country inn, with two open fires and drinking and dining rooms that run into one another. Mark and Alison Evans hold the licence. The kitchen cooks to the season — slow-cooked pork belly, hearty casseroles, and generously portioned Sunday lunches. Dark Star Hophead and Fuller's London Pride are the regular cask ales, and there is a walled garden behind the building for warmer afternoons. Dogs are welcome in the pub, though not in the rooms upstairs.
The building has a longer history than its 2021 reopening suggests. A blacksmith named Henry Newman was living on the site by 1851; his niece Matilda called herself a barmaid, and in 1855 Newman formally opened the Three Horseshoes, describing himself as blacksmith and shopkeeper. The pub had closed by the time the Evans family took it on and brought it back. It is now registered as an Asset of Community Value.
There is no shop in East Worldham, so stock up in Alton, two miles north-west, before you settle in. If you walk the loop through West Worldham, the South Down Coffee Roastery keeps a bistro serving coffee and pastries, though it is worth checking the hours before you set out.
The village sits on the B3004 at the edge of the South Downs National Park, among farmland and woods to the south-east of Alton. Its lanes are narrow and sunken — Blanket Street, Wyck Lane, Shelley's Lane — and the footpaths open onto views towards Alton, the Surrey Hills and the Sussex Downs. This is walking country. The Hangers Way runs three and a half miles from St Mary's down to Selborne, crossing Binswood, climbing through the beech of Wick Hill Hanger and following Oakhanger Stream, where local telling puts the ghost of a monk. A longer nine-mile loop carries you back to Alton.
St Mary the Virgin, the parish church, is largely 13th-century, its Early English work substantially restored in 1865 by David Brandon, who added the vestry and south porch. Inside are five nave lancets, a timber bell turret with a shingled spire, and a worn semi-effigial slab of a medieval woman whose identity has never been settled; it has long been linked to the de Venuz family. The Domesday surveyors recorded fourteen households here in 1086, along with ten acres of meadow and a mill worth six shillings and sevenpence. They valued the whole place at two pounds.
Seven hundred metres east, King John's Hill carries an Iron Age hillfort, with pottery from around 100 BC found in its soil; the same rise later held a medieval deer park recorded from 1372, with lodge buildings there traditionally attributed to Edward III. Hops shaped the year for far longer — thirty-two acres by the 1842 tithe map, a crop that lasted here until 1996, with seasonal pickers camping on the farms and a horse fair held outside the pub at the end of the season. Converted kilns still stand in the fields.
For families there is a playground and a village hall, and Worldham Golf & Padel offers a parkland course, padel, pickleball, a driving range and twelve holes of crazy golf. Chawton, where Jane Austen spent her last eight years, is close by, along with Gilbert White's house at Selborne and the steam and diesel trains of the Watercress Line.
The parish council describes East Worldham as "a small but close-knit community." On a quiet lane with two miles between it and the nearest shop, that is easy enough to believe.