Hawkley

An inn worth walking towards

The Hawkley Inn stands on Pococks Lane, just off Upper Green. It is the kind of pub that fills with walkers, cyclists and riders, and it has six bedrooms above if you decide the day's climbing has earned a night rather than a drink. Zoe and her team run it, dogs are welcome, and seven real ales rotate through the bar.

The kitchen changes its choices with the season and the day, so no menu is a promise, but the things that recur are worth knowing. There is a Hawkley beef burger with cheddar, red-onion chutney and smoked bacon; a black-pudding Scotch egg; smoked ChalkStream trout with dill crème fraîche and pickled cucumber; a fish pie with buttered greens; and, for anyone who has had enough of meat, salt-baked celeriac with truffle purée, pickled mushrooms, kale and hazelnuts. The ingredients are sourced locally, which in this valley is not a marketing line so much as a description of geography.

Holloways, Hangers and a poet's hill

You come here for the walking, and the walking starts more or less at the pub door. Hawkley sits in a valley under the East Hampshire Hangers, steep chalk-and-greensand slopes so thickly wooded that the village keeps its own weather of shade and damp. The lanes are sunk deep into the ground. Standfast Lane is the one to see, a holloway floored with flinty malmstone cobbles and roofed by coppiced hazel, the sort of track that has been worn below the level of the fields it runs between. Somerville described it as "Hollow old Standfast Lane snaked deeply sunk in the greensand," and there is no better way to put it.

From the inn an eight-and-a-half-mile circuit runs out through Standfast Lane and Empshott Green, up to the Shoulder of Mutton viewpoint and back down the old holloways, which turn sticky and slippery after rain. A gentler option is the Hangers Way, which passes through Hawkley on its twenty-one-mile course; the three-mile section down from Noar Hill crosses sheep pasture and a Bronze Age burial mound before the church tower rises into view across the last few fields. Just south, at Steep, the poet Edward Thomas walked these hills, and a 1937 memorial to him stands on the Shoulder of Mutton with the Downs laid out below.

Teulon's tower and an older font

The church of St Peter and St Paul was rebuilt in 1865 by Samuel Sanders Teulon on the site of a medieval one. It has malmstone walls, a tall west tower with a semicircular stair turret and a steep Rhenish-helm roof, copper gargoyles, Byzantine capitals and eight bells. A square font from the late twelfth century survives from the earlier building, and Simon Whistler's etched Millennium window carries the light. The cricket club plays friendly Sunday matches on the pitch opposite, spectators welcome.

When Hawkley Hanger gave way

In 1774 part of Hawkley Hanger tore loose and slid down the hill, exposing a bare freestone cliff; Gilbert White, over at Selborne, wrote it down.

Rails, roads and village greens

Liss station is a little over two miles off, on the line to Petersfield and beyond, and Hawkley lies west of the A3. Around 440 people live here. The parish council looks after Upper and Lower Greens, the village seats and the bus shelters. In summer, Sunday cricket is played on the pitch across from the church.