Greatham

A Pub Reborn on Ancient Gravel

The Greatham Inn is the village's only pub, and until a year or so ago it was called The Queens. It reopened in September 2025 after a summer refit and a change of hands, taken on by the people who also run the Whistlestop in Liss. They have spoken about live music, beer festivals and wedding receptions, and about running it as a family food pub. A local reporter marked the reopening by "putting the Great back into Greatham's local."

Greatham sits just off the A3, inside the South Downs National Park, on the gravel its name records. Greotham in Old English meant a farm on gravel; the Domesday scribes wrote it Greteham, and gravel is still underfoot in places. The surveyors of 1086 found seven households here and valued the whole manor at three pounds, the same figure as twenty years earlier, when Queen Edith had held it and William had not yet taken it for himself.

Paths and the Military Railway

The walking is the reason to base yourself here. The Shipwrights Way runs through the village on its way from Bordon to Liss, seven and a half miles that are nearly all flat and off-road, with no gates, steps or stiles; you can push a buggy or a wheelchair along most of it. It skirts the edge of the military training ground, then wet woodland and the line of the old army railway beside the River Rother. For something with more in it, the field path from Liss to Selborne passes through Greatham on a seven-mile route with several rises and about 400 m of ascent, past orchards, a spring-fed lake and the views from Noar Hill before joining the Hangers Way into Selborne, country associated with Gilbert White. In winter parts of it are mud.

Longmoor Camp, north of the village, began in 1903 as a school for mounted infantry, and the army laid a railway to reach it that eventually ran down through Greatham to Liss. The Longmoor Military Railway closed in 1969 after a second career as a film location; Young Winston and The Great St Trinian's Train Robbery were both shot on it.

The Village's Shared Ground

Beside the village hall there are playing fields, a youth-sized football pitch and a playground rebuilt in 2024 for £110,000, with all-weather surfacing and a fitness trail for teenagers; the hall's own programme runs to ballet, toddler football and craft mornings. Residents have spent more than a year working up plans for a community shop with a café. The nearest station is Liss, under two miles south and step-free throughout, and Stagecoach's route 38 links the village to Petersfield and Alton.

Two Churches Across the Road

There are two churches, across the road from one another. The one still in use, St John the Baptist, was built in 1875 in polygonal malmstone with Bath-stone dressings, a broach spire over the south tower and a carved Mother and Child above the font. It is left open all day. The older church it replaced is a ruin now: the medieval nave stands roofless, only the chancel keeps its roof, and the stonework is unstable enough that the parish council asks you to keep children close.

Margery Caryll in Alabaster

Inside the roofed part is the reason to make the walk across. Dame Margery Caryll lies in alabaster on a slab of black marble. She was baptised in this church in 1594, widowed at twenty-four, and died in London in 1632, possibly from blood poisoning after she pricked her finger sewing. It is a London-school effigy in Staffordshire alabaster, Ashford marble and slate, with folds in the dress that lift her feet clear of the stone.