Farringdon

Ancient Yews and a Divided Village

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 village pub; Lower Farringdon lies by the A32 crossroads. Between them run fields and rising wooded ground within the South Downs National Park.

The Village Pub and Farringdon's History

The Rose & Crown occupies a building put up in 1810 by the Knight family of Chawton. Ryan and Sarah Rainier run it now; chef-owner Ryan bases the changing menu on seasonal British cooking with subtle South African influences. The garden looks out over the Hampshire countryside.

Farringdon's older record reaches back to Domesday: the commissioners counted 33 households in 1086 and valued the whole place at £21.

Arriving and Walking from Chawton

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. Community bus 205 serves the Alton corridor but is very limited.

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 church and the playground at Shirnall Meadow. The walk follows part of the disused Meon Valley railway line, which ran between Alton and Fareham; this section also follows St Swithun's Way, and the route crosses the A32. A short wooden platform was built at Farringdon in 1930, and passenger service began there in 1931. 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.

A Folly and Darker Stories

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. The terracotta forms 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 the Church

Inside the church stands an 18th-century panelled pulpit from the period when Gilbert White served as curate. Four fixed bells are rung with strikers rather than ropes. Walkers, cyclists and dogs are welcome; level access serves the main areas, with a ramp available on request.