Below the terrace of the Duke of Cumberland Arms, water runs through a series of stone pools holding trout and crayfish. The gardens fall away in more than three acres of terraces down the hillside, with long views over the wooded slopes, and you can sit out among them with a drink while whatever is in the pools gets on with its day. This is more or less the centre of Henley, a small wooded hamlet folded into the hills of the South Downs National Park, west of Midhurst. There is no shop, no church of its own. There is the pub, and the pub is the reason to come.
The building is 18th-century, coursed stone with brick dressings under a half-hipped tiled roof, and Historic England lists it at Grade II. Inside, the front rooms link together with red quarry-tile floors, boarded walls and ceilings, bench seating and matchboard counters, a survival that CAMRA rates as of very special national historic interest. It is food-led without having tidied any of that away.
The kitchen is run by Simon Goodman, who owns the place and cooks the meat from local farms, fish off the south coast and vegetables from the pub's own patch. He was named UK Pub Chef of the Year in 2010; the Duke took the Good Food Guide's Pub of the Year in 2012 and Sussex Life Pub of the Year in 2016. Menus change daily with what comes in, but they run to things like ale-battered day-boat haddock with pea puree and triple-cooked chips, wild-boar-and-apple sausages with mash and onion gravy, confit pork belly with creamed cabbage and apple glaze, and cod with pancetta, broad beans, samphire and a Langham Hip Hop beer sauce. Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter and Langham Hip Hop are the regular cask ales, with other Langham beers rotating through.
Elizabeth Carter, who edited the Good Food Guide, called it "infectiously welcoming, centuries old, in a glorious location." Dogs are welcome.
The Serpent Trail is picked up directly opposite the Duke, and from there the ground rises towards Black Down, the highest point in the whole national park. A two-mile National Trust route climbs to the Temple of the Winds, a viewpoint with a curved stone seat, through heathland, ancient woodland and flower-rich meadows. Tennyson built his house Aldworth nearby in 1869 and lived there until he died in 1892, and the view of green Sussex fading into blue with a grey glimpse of sea was one he wrote about. For a longer day, the Haslemere-to-Fernhurst circular runs eight or nine miles over gates, stiles and steady climbs, taking in the Temple of the Winds and the remains of Fernhurst Furnace, an ironworks that made cast iron, tools and cannon from about 1614 to 1777.
Traces of older Henley are thin on the ground. The old turnpike kept its pillow-shaped stone setts until the 1950s, and the wooded slopes above the hamlet held the remains of Verdley Castle, probably a medieval hunting lodge, possibly fortified, into the last century.
Getting here means driving or the number 70 bus, which runs between Haslemere station and Midhurst and stops up on the A286 at Henley Common, above the hamlet; the Duke is down the smaller lane below. Haslemere is the nearest railhead. Midhurst, Cowdray's polo grounds and Tudor ruins, and Petworth House with its Capability Brown deer park are all within reach for a day out.
Come back down the lane at the end of it, and the pools will still be running, the trout still turning over in the dark.