The font in Empshott's church is Purbeck marble, probably dating from around 1200, which makes it about the same age as the building around it. Holy Rood is a complete thirteenth-century church, Grade I listed, with four-bay nave arcades carved in dog-tooth and stiff-leaf and a west turret that pairs a glazed timber lantern from the seventeenth century with a shingled spire added in the nineteenth century. Inside, a set of 1624 furnishings survives together: a strapwork screen, communion rails, a pulpit, chairs, a desk and a chest. The medieval dedication was to St Lawrence, and the church stayed attached to Southwick Priory until the Dissolution.
There is not much of a village to stand in. Empshott is dispersed and high, a scatter of farms and woodland in the East Hampshire hangers south of Selborne, running down from the B3006 towards a mill on the River Rother. Expect sunken lanes, dark beech hangers, steep wooded slopes and long valley views rather than a green with a shop on it.
There is no pub and no shop. The Village Stores and Post Office closed in the 1970s and the building sat nearly derelict until it was refurbished in 2013. What the village keeps is the Empshott Hut, a former Army hut given to the parish in 1923 and reopened after another refurbishment in 2017. It has fibre broadband now, and a calendar that runs to Scottish reels, harvest suppers and quizzes.
For a pub you walk or drive the couple of miles to Hawkley, Selborne or Greatham. The Hawkley Inn does its own butchery and makes most of what it serves; recent menus have included smoked Chalk Stream trout with dill crème fraîche, a black-pudding Scotch egg with burnt-apple sauce, and sticky-toffee pudding with Guinness caramel, with seven real ales on. The Selborne Arms has been run by Nick and Hayley Carter since 2001 and keeps two bars, real fires and a garden with a children's playground; recent menus have included steak-and-ale pie, Welsh rarebit on homemade bread, or a sweet-onion, rocket and goat's-cheese cheesecake, alongside Ringwood Fortyniner and Bowman Swift One.
The walking is the real reason to stay. The Hangers Way drops into Empshott from Selborne, a two-mile section that climbs past Noar Hill before falling steeply through woodland. Noar Hill itself is a nature reserve on former medieval chalk pits, twenty hectares of unsurfaced and sometimes slippery path where pyramidal orchids, brown hairstreak and small blue butterflies appear in summer. A longer circular from the church runs about five and a half miles through river valleys and wildflower meadows, past the memorial rose garden at Le Court and over twenty-one stiles; it can be muddy, and the undergrowth in Adderhood Hanger gets dense by high summer.
Le Court, just outside the hamlet, was the first of the Cheshire homes. Leonard Cheshire bought the house in 1946, and in 1948 took in a terminally ill retired Army vet, Arthur Dykes, and cared for him himself. Others followed. The original house was demolished after a replacement was built, and that later home closed in 2007 and is also gone, but the rose garden that walkers pass was kept as a memorial to the residents and to Cheshire.
The place is old and was never large. Domesday recorded four households, a mill worth four shillings and an annual value of one pound five shillings, a very small settlement; a 1428 survey still found fewer than ten inhabitants holding houses here. The most modern thing to happen to it may be the early-1980s widening of the B3006, done so the road could carry cruise missiles to the military ranges at Longmoor.
The nearest station is Liss, about 2.7 miles away; otherwise it is the A3 and the B3006, and a Stagecoach bus between Alton and Petersfield that stops at the Selborne Arms roughly every two hours, worth checking before you rely on it. On a clear night in midsummer, the walk back over Noar Hill is worth timing for after dark, when you may see glow-worms.