Itchen Abbas

The Plough, past and plate

The Plough stands on Main Road in Itchen Abbas, near the B3047 that follows the chalk valley between Winchester and Alresford, and for twenty of its recent years it was not the Plough at all. From 1994 to 2014 it traded as the Trout, then went back to its older name. Inside, the restaurant floor is slate, the shelves hold antique kitchen tools, and the bar carries a run of local vintage adverts.

The kitchen sources meat from Owton's and Smith's and fish from Premier Fish in Salisbury, and the food is home-cooked. Menus change, but recent plates have included watercress soup, asparagus with hollandaise, a poached egg and crispy prosciutto, beef bourguignon pie, steak-and-ale pie, and fish and chips. There are six en-suite rooms upstairs if you want to stay after the second pint. Dogs are welcome, though it's worth checking ahead. The garden has a raised patio, a grassed area and a fenced pond, with both sun and shade depending on where you sit.

Ale and the chalk stream

At the bar you will usually find Hardys & Hansons bitter alongside changing guests, among them beers from the Hampshire breweries Flower Pots, Triple fff and Bowman. One recent visitor, Helen Tranckle, summed the place up as having "great atmosphere in the evening and a beautiful location."

The location is the River Itchen, a spring-fed chalk stream of a kind that is genuinely rare, fed by the aquifer beneath the downs. The village sits beside it. From the church you can pick up a moderate three-to-four-mile circuit that crosses the river on footbridges and loops through Avington Park, Chilland, Martyr Worthy and Easton, taking in the mansion and lake at Avington. A longer four-to-six-mile route, the Straight Mile, uses about three miles of the old railway line before dropping back to the riverbank; expect kissing gates and, after rain, mud. Parking in the village is very limited.

Watercress and Norman stone

West Lea, a farm shop out toward Alresford, sells its own watercress and trout from Itchen Abbas, along with cheeses, bread and cakes.

The church, St John the Baptist, is a knapped-flint building rebuilt in the nineteenth century by the Winchester architect W. Coles, who kept the twelfth-century arches from what stood before. The reset north doorway has scallop capitals and zig-zag carving, and the chancel arch its band of billet ornament. The plan is cruciform, with a west bellcote and an octagonal font.

Buried history and the lost railway

The Domesday surveyors counted thirty-four households, one mill worth a pound, and twenty-four acres of meadow, and valued the whole manor at eleven pounds. Beneath the modern village lie older things still: a Bronze Age pond barrow, a mixed-rite cemetery spanning the late Roman and early Saxon periods, and part of the aqueduct that once carried water to Roman Winchester. All were found during development work and left buried in place, preserved rather than opened up.

The railway that came through in 1865 carried the watercress to market and closed in 1973, and the station is gone. Winchester, four miles off, is the nearest one now, about twenty minutes by the Stagecoach 67 that stops on Old Station Road. The same bus runs the other way to Alresford, where the preserved Watercress Line keeps its 1875 signal box, and on past Hinton Ampner.

When every room rang

There is an old Hampshire song, "Avington Pond," that names the men who worked the water meadows — Davis, Morris, Will Mason, Archer, Churcher — and sends them all up to the Plough at Itchen to make every room in it ring.