The Red Lion sits beside Fernhurst's green, a fireplace inside and outside seating for the months when sitting outside is possible. Mark and Annie Griffin run it, and the kitchen keeps to the sort of food you hope for after a long walk: beer-battered fish and chips, homemade pies, burgers, ploughman's lunches, a prawn and smoked-salmon salad, and Sunday roasts. Tuesdays are grill nights. Once a month Annie cooks Thai. Dogs are welcome, and the long-distance path down from Black Down emerges more or less at the door, which makes the Red Lion the natural end of a day rather than the start of one.
In the parish hamlet of Henley, the Duke of Cumberland Arms takes a different line. It is a food-led sixteenth-century pub, and the head chef and owner, Simon Goodman, sources meat from nearby organic farms, fish off the south coast and vegetables from the pub's own patch. The menu changes, but has recently run to day-boat ale-battered haddock with pea purée and triple-cooked chips, wild-boar-and-apple sausages with mash and onion gravy, sweet-pea-and-mint ravioli, crab fettuccine with champagne velouté, and cod in a sauce made with Langham's Hip Hop beer. It was named Good Food Guide Pub of the Year in 2012 and Sussex Life Pub of the Year in 2016. "The emphasis here at The Duke is on simple and delicious dishes," Goodman says, which undersells the crab fettuccine somewhat.
For daytime supplies there is the village shop and post office on Crossfield, and next to it the Fernhurst Hub, a community café with a small gift shop and a free lending library. Liz Rawlings manages it. You can get Fairtrade coffee, cakes and locally made ice cream, and browse candles, soaps and cards printed with village scenes painted by local artists. The children's library runs from picture books up to about nine years old.
St Margaret's church has a Norman chancel and nave, though the Victorians rebuilt so much of it that the medieval fabric now announces itself: the Norman font, the tie beams, most of the north wall, two lancet windows. A twelfth-century aumbry, later decorated, did service as a gatepost before being recognised and returned to the chancel in 1940. During the nineteenth-century work, figures of St Margaret and King Malcolm of Scotland were mistakenly placed over the west door instead of St Margaret of Antioch, where they remain. The rood commemorates the Rev G. H. Ranking, the parish priest, killed in the First World War. In the churchyard stands the war memorial, a Portland-stone Calvary carved by Alfred Hitch and unveiled in 1921; its foundations were laid by local ex-servicemen. It records forty-one dead from the first war and thirteen from the second.
Walking is the main reason to come. Black Down rises behind the village to about 280 metres, pine and heather over greensand, the highest ground in Sussex. A two-mile National Trust circuit climbs through the woods to the Temple of the Winds, a curved stone seat looking south across the Weald. Tennyson kept his summer house, Aldworth, up here and wrote of the view: "Green Sussex fading into blue with one grey glimpse of sea." The longer circular from Haslemere is eight or nine miles and takes most of an afternoon, following Serpent Trail markers over the hill and dropping back down to the Red Lion.
About a kilometre west of the green are the remains of an ironworks that made cast iron, tools and cannon from 1614: a hundred-metre pond-bay dam, sluices, wheel pits, a brick-lined casting pit. Three waterwheels once ran at once. It was advertised for sale in 1777 and worked no more.
Every May or June the village holds its Revels. The children elect a May Queen who processes with attendants, floats and a brass band before being crowned by last year's queen. The tradition goes back about eighty years; a surviving 1923 programme names Dorothy Howes.