Exton

The Shoe and village essentials

The Shoe Inn sits on the South Downs Way with a riverside garden with views of Old Winchester Hill. In warm weather there is an ice-cream shack out there serving homemade flavours, and in autumn and winter the fires are lit inside. It serves coffee made from Hampshire Pantry beans, roasted at Hampshire Pantry, and the kitchen leans on local suppliers: Smith's of West Meon twelve-hour roast belly pork with savoy cabbage, gratin dauphinois and cider jus; beer-battered haddock with minted mushy peas; baked Camembert with Calabrian hot honey; a chickpea-and-coriander falafel with kale and chimichurri; and a bread-and-butter pudding to finish. There is a children's menu, real ales and dogs are welcome. The building you drink in is a replacement for an earlier Shoe that stood across the road, roughly where the beer garden is now.

You should know before you arrive that The Shoe is Exton's only pub, and the only commercial building within the conservation area; there is no shop in the village. The village had a general store and post office until 1963, and before that a corn mill, a smithy and a primary school, all of which closed one by one across the twentieth century. For a loaf or a paper you go a short way south to the Post Office and Village Stores at Corhampton, which marks its local produce with a blue dot and does hampers and artisan breads.

Lanes of flint and the parish church

The village itself is a loose, almost rectangular tangle of lanes on the west bank of the Meon, where the valley floor broadens before the chalk climbs away east and north. Walls, trees and curving lanes keep the views short and gradual until Bridge End and Shoe Lane open eastward to the Downs. The building materials shift as you walk: flint, brick, timber frame, cob, clay tile and some surviving thatch. Marriner's Cottage and Church View still carry their sixteenth-century frames, and Grove Cottages began as a late-medieval hall before being split into three homes. Bridge Cottage keeps the old shopfront from when it was a shop.

St Peter and St Paul stands on the site of an older church, its flint-rubble walls topped by a shingled spire over a timber bell turret. It is essentially thirteenth-century, restored in 1847 and reworked again by Charles Spooner at the close of the nineteenth. Inside there is a single original lancet, a double piscina, two canopied niches in the east wall, some good eighteenth-century wall monuments and a tall Victorian font. The church is usually open daily.

Trail to the chalk hills

Walking is a major reason to visit. The Beacon Hill to Old Winchester Hill stretch of the South Downs Way drops steeply over pasture and step stiles into the village before climbing again through chalk grassland with wildflowers and butterflies, up to the Iron Age hillfort on Old Winchester Hill. From Exton itself there is a five-and-a-half-mile circuit of about three hours that uses the old railway trackbed and Monarch's Way before joining the trail to the summit. The trackbed is the Meon Valley Trail now, a level, car-free route for walking, cycling, riding and dogs, following the line the railway took beside the village from 1903; passenger trains ended in 1955 and all traffic ceased by 1963.

Arriving in the Meon Valley

Getting here without a car takes planning. Petersfield station is about ten miles east and Winchester roughly eleven west; the A32 runs just past the village, with the B3035 heading three miles to Bishop's Waltham and its free-to-enter medieval palace. The Meon Valley Community Bus stops at The Shoe on Mondays for Fareham and Fridays for Winchester, and on Wednesdays for Petersfield with request stops on the A32 between Droxford and West Meon; there is no service on other days or bank holidays.

Older stories beneath quiet lanes

Dig a little and Exton keeps offering things. Archaeologists working at Manor Farm through 2020 uncovered a Roman temple, a bath house with two hot rooms and a hypocaust, and a sealed mausoleum. In 1580 the Manor House's resident was gaoled in Winchester over his wife's Catholicism, then let out the next year on the grounds that he could not control her. The first written record of the place is a grant from King Edmund in 940. Most days, though, it is quieter than any of that: the river, the churchyard looking north, and the old railway line, quiet and open to a dog on a lead.