Two yew trees stand at All Saints in Upper Farringdon, clipped and enormous, the western one measuring 9.27 metres round its trunk. Gilbert White, curate here from 1761 to 1785, who rode over from Selborne to take the services, recorded them in his journal on 6 January 1781: "In the churchyard are two male yew trees, the largest of which measures 30 feet in girth." In 2022 a £13,500 appeal paid for a frame to hold it up.
Farringdon comes in two parts. Upper Farringdon gathers around the church and the Rose & Crown; Lower Farringdon sits half a mile off at the A32 crossroads, where the Royal Oak keeps the other end of the village fed. Between them run fields and rising wooded ground, all of it inside the South Downs National Park.
The Rose & Crown occupies a building put up in 1810 by the Knight family of Chawton. Ryan and Sarah Rainier run it now; Ryan cooks, and his seasonal British menu carries a South African accent. You might start with house biltong and aged Cheddar, then take the dill-battered haddock, the apple-and-cider-braised pork belly, or roast lamb rump with wild-garlic jus. The garden looks out over the countryside.
The Royal Oak, down at the crossroads, is the quieter and plainer of the two: evening meals, a garden, a porch, parking, and homemade food. It reopened some years back under landlord Barry Pethers, having earlier traded as the Golden Pheasant.
Bring what you need, or pick it up in Alton, the market town about 2.8 miles north, which also has the nearest railway station. The A32 runs straight through Lower Farringdon. A community bus, the 205, threads through on the Alton corridor, but it runs rarely enough that you should check the timetable before relying on it.
The village is well suited to arriving on foot. The Jane Austen Circular Walk is 4.5 miles out of Chawton and back, roughly two and three-quarter hours, crossing fields into Farringdon past the Rose & Crown, the church and the playground at Shirnall Meadow. It follows part of the old Meon Valley railway line, which once ran from Alton to Fareham and had a halt here from 1930 with a single wooden platform, then a stretch of St Swithun's Way, and it asks you to cross the A32 with care. Wellingtonias and yews mark the descent into Upper Farringdon. The valley near Chawton is one of the springs that feed the River Wey. In a letter to her sister Cassandra on 29 May 1811, Austen laid out a plan for the party to walk over and take tea at Faringdon with her friend Harriet Benn, whose family lived here. At the far end of the walk, Chawton holds Jane Austen's House, the cottage where she spent her last eight years and wrote and published her novels, and where her writing table, letters and first editions are kept.
Church Road holds the village's strangest building. Massey's Folly is a great pile of red brick and terracotta that the rector Thomas Hackett Massey spent about thirty years raising, from 1870 to 1900, with two or three craftsmen and no clear purpose for it. Its official description calls the terracotta an "illustrated catalogue" of the 1873–80 period. In 1925 it became the school and village hall.
The rest of the history is thin and old. The Domesday commissioners counted 33 households here in 1086 and valued the whole place at £21. In the churchyard, a gravestone for Mary Windebank is carved with the four-poster bed from which, the story goes, she was dragged and murdered for money kept beneath it.
Inside All Saints the panelled pulpit that Gilbert White preached from is still in place, and four fixed bells are rung by hand with strikers rather than ropes. The door is left open to walkers, cyclists and dogs, with a ramp brought out when someone needs one.