Church, chalk and hangers
Empshott
A dispersed Hampshire hamlet where a complete thirteenth-century church opens onto steep woodland, downland wildlife and long valley views.
- Best for
- Medieval detail and wooded walking
- Give it
- A slow half-day
- Don’t miss
- Holy Rood’s Purbeck-marble font
Photo: Michael Garlick · CC BY-SA 2.0 · cropped
The Fox verdict
Come for the church, stay for the hangers
Empshott rewards walkers and church enthusiasts rather than village-centre browsers.
Holy Rood brings rare architectural concentration to a tiny, scattered settlement, while the surrounding beech slopes, chalk pits and meadow paths supply the wider day out. Nearby Selborne and Hawkley add food and indoor history without pretending that Empshott has a commercial centre of its own.
Where to go
Places in Empshott
Every place below is checked against a published source, listed with what it is and how long to give it.
Local signatures
3 places
Start here
Church of the Holy Rood
A largely c.1200 church with dog-tooth and stiff-leaf nave arcades, a Purbeck-marble font and an unusually coherent group of 1624 furnishings.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Empshott
Hangers Way: Selborne to Empshott
A two-mile section climbing past High Common and flower-rich Noar Hill Hanger before a steep woodland descent into Empshott.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: Allow around one hour
- Locality
- between Selborne and Empshott
- Access
- This is a linear walk; plan the return or onward journey before setting out.
The Selborne Arms
A traditional pub with two bars, real fires and a garden with a children’s adventure playground, serving homemade dishes and real ales.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 75 minutes
- Locality
- Selborne
Food & drink
1 placeThe Hawkley Inn
A dog-friendly country pub and inn that does its own butchery and says most of its menu is made in house, with a selection of real ales.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 75 minutes
- Locality
- Hawkley
Walks & outdoors
1 placeNoar Hill Nature Reserve
A twenty-hectare reserve shaped by medieval chalk pits, with orchids and notable butterflies in summer and glow-worms after dark.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 90 minutes
- Locality
- Noar Hill
- Access
- Paths are unsurfaced, sometimes steep and slippery; livestock graze throughout the year.
History & heritage
1 placeGilbert White’s House & Gardens
A museum covering naturalist Gilbert White and explorers Frank and Lawrence Oates, paired with White’s house and garden.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around two hours
- Locality
- Selborne
- Access
- The first floor is stair-only; the ground floor, café and shop have level or ramped access.
Things to do
2 placesEmpshott Hut
The village’s community-run former Army hut hosts events open to all and carries forward a local gathering place first given to the parish in 1923.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 45 minutes
- Locality
- Empshott
- Access
- Village hall hosting events open to all.
Durleighmarsh Farm Shop and Pick Your Own
A family-run farm shop and pick-your-own for seasonal fruit, vegetables, flowers and herbs, including a notably large asparagus crop.
- Visit length
- Editorial estimate: around 60 minutes
- Locality
- Rogate Road, near Petersfield
- Access
- Pick-your-own crops are seasonal—check the official visitor page before travel.
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Three ways to explore Empshott
Signature outings
Stone and marble
Look from Holy Rood’s c.1200 Purbeck-marble font and carved nave arcades to the group of furnishings installed in 1624.
A hill made for wildlife
Follow Noar Hill’s unsurfaced paths through medieval chalk workings for orchids and notable butterflies in summer.
White and the Oates collections
Set Gilbert White’s natural history beside the stories of Frank and Lawrence Oates in the Selborne museum.
The village story
Empshott Village Guide
A tiny settlement whose church, wooded slopes and long memory reward an unhurried visit.
A medieval church in a scattered hamlet
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.
The hut and the nearest tables
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.
Paths through chalk and beech
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.
A tiny place, then and now
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.
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A guide with a point of view
Written from research. Edited for real journeys.
Use the Official site links for live practical details, then use this guide for context, ideas and room to explore.
Photography credits & licences
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- File:Empshott, Church of the Holy Rood - geograph.org.uk - 6276463.jpg — photograph by Michael Garlick; Empshott, Church of the Holy Rood by Michael Garlick. Source record on Wikimedia Commons. Declared source image. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0. File changes: Downloaded from Wikimedia Commons, resized to a maximum 1920px edge and encoded as an optimised JPEG. Display changes: Displayed with responsive CSS cropping.
Sources
Every place on this page is checked against a published source. Each entry links the record we used and names who publishes it.
- Church of the Holy Rood — historicengland.org.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Hangers Way: Selborne to Empshott — hants.gov.uk statutory register or public authority record not machine-readable; publisher restricts automated access
- Noar Hill Nature Reserve — hiwwt.org.uk other published source
- Empshott Hut — hawkley-pc.gov.uk statutory register or public authority
- The Hawkley Inn — hawkleyinn.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- The Selborne Arms — selbornearms.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Durleighmarsh Farm Shop and Pick Your Own — visit-hampshire.co.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation
- Gilbert White’s House & Gardens — gilbertwhiteshouse.org.uk operator, sector body or destination organisation