Iping

Where the Rother Meets the Heath

The Rother slides under a low stone bridge at Iping, five ribbed arches with four cutwaters on each side, most of it built in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the fifth northern arch added later. The church stands close beside the water. That is more or less the centre of the village: a scattering of houses off the A272, two miles west of Midhurst, keeping to itself half a mile from the road.

What people come for lies south of the A272, where Iping and Stedham Commons spread across 125 hectares of sandy ground, heather and gorse. This is lowland heath, one of the better surviving examples in Sussex, and a habitat that has lost more than four-fifths of its national extent in the past two centuries.

The Commons Loop and a Stedham Table

The easiest way in is the loop from Iping Common car park: a mile or two, stile-free and mostly level, laid out for pushchairs, wheelchairs and mobility scooters. It crosses a wooden bridge, joins the Serpent Trail, and passes two heather-covered Bronze Age burial mounds. An optional extension carries you onto Stedham Common to a sculpture called Dragonflies Rest. The commons hold silver-studded blue butterflies and all five of the heathland dragonfly species found in southern Britain, along with woodlark, nightjar and Dartford warbler; in 2025 the wardens found adders displaying beside a path. The Serpent Trail itself runs 65 miles between Haslemere and Petersfield.

The nearest pub is the Hamilton Arms in neighbouring Stedham, a country pub with a Thai restaurant serving more than a hundred dishes, among them the Chicken Thai Red Curry. The proprietor, Suhail Hussain, built the menu with his mentor Surapee Mudita Karnasuta, a founder member of the Thai Restaurant Association. For everyday supplies and a public toilet, Midhurst is two miles east; there is a garden centre with a tea room at Trotton.

St Mary's by the Water

St Mary's was built in 1840 and heavily rebuilt in 1885, keeping most of its earlier west tower, in Hythe sandstone on the riverside site of the medieval church before it. Inside are a circular font, seventeenth-century chests and eighteenth-century communion rails. In the churchyard stands a weathered eighteenth-century carving of Death firing an arrow at a shrinking victim.

Mill Work, Domesday and Invisible Iping

The river once ran a mill here, first recorded in the eleventh century, which over the centuries ground grain, cleaned woollen cloth, sawed timber and finally made paper — the Pewtress family supplied newsprint to The Times before it turned to blotting paper and burned down in 1925. Domesday found fifteen households, one church and a mill worth three shillings and twopence. H. G. Wells set the opening of his novel The Invisible Man here, a stranger arriving at the inn in the depth of winter.

Arriving Along Lady Hamilton's Walk

Buses 91 and 92 stop opposite Iping Lane on the Midhurst–Petersfield run, and Petersfield is the practical station if you come without a car. Admiral Sir Charles Hamilton lived at Iping House by the bridge; from 1939 to 1957 two sisters, Gladys and Ivy Smith, ran it as a hotel, and the riverside path is known as Lady Hamilton's Walk.