A buffer stop and a run of exposed concrete sleepers sit beside the River Rother, a short walk from the station, marking a line that no longer carries trains. They belong to the Longmoor Military Railway, which the army began building near here in 1903 to teach soldiers how to lay and run track. The extension into Liss was finished in 1933, and the whole thing closed in 1969. Today the route beside the river is the Riverside Railway Walk, a mile and a quarter each way through alder and grey poplar, with bluebells and wild garlic in spring and, if you are lucky at the water, a kingfisher.
Liss has two centres that look nothing alike. West Liss is the older part, gathered around the Church of St Peter; East Liss grew up around the railway station in the nineteenth century. The village sits in the wooded valley of the Upper Rother in the Western Weald, just off the A3, and serves as a way into the western edge of the South Downs.
For dinner, the Temple Inn out at Liss Forest cooks British pub food with Hungarian leanings: pan-roasted chicken supreme, pork belly with a crackled top, crisp-skinned salmon in a white-wine-and-dill sauce, and a mutton goulash served with giant couscous and pickled gherkins. Dogs are welcome, there is a garden and patio, and the cask beers change, often with something from Hogs Back on.
The Spread Eagle, at the edge of West Liss on Farnham Road, is the older-feeling pub of the two: low oak beams, an inglenook fireplace and a garden, with Sharp's Doom Bar and Timothy Taylor Landlord as the regular ales and Sunday roasts at the weekend. The building is reckoned to be around four hundred years old, and the pub tells its own tales of ghosts and hangings from an oak. In the village centre, the Whistle Stop keeps the railway theme in its name, having started life as the Railway Hotel. Florio's, an independent van, works from its car park turning out wood-fired pizzas, among them the Besto Pesto, with a pesto and cream-cheese base, chicken, roasted peppers and smoked bacon.
On Station Road, the Turtle Bean Cafe does full breakfasts, lunches, cream teas and takeaway coffee, and welcomes dogs; Liss Bakery is nearby.
The churches reward a look. St Peter's in West Liss is thirteenth-century at its core, built of ironstone with a shingled broach spire, and its brick porch carries a painted inscription recording its gift by Henry James in 1639. St Mary's, near the station, is Victorian, designed by Sir Arthur Blomfield in 1891 and enlarged by Sir Edward Maufe in 1930; inside is a hammer-beam roof and a triptych by Martin Travers.
The Domesday surveyors found sixteen households here in 1086, four ploughlands and a single mill worth one shilling and twopence, and valued the whole place at fifty shillings. The military railway had a stranger afterlife on film: Hitchcock shot part of The Lady Vanishes on it in 1938, and Richard Attenborough used it for Young Winston in 1972. When it held its final open day in July 1969, twelve thousand people came to watch.
For the children there is Newman Collard Park, with tennis courts, football pitches, a pond and a large play area shaped with help from local children. Trains from the station run on the Waterloo to Portsmouth line, and on a quiet morning the old railway path offers a good way to see why the village grew where it did.