Lurgashall

Green, Cricket and the Noah's Ark

Grayswood Cricket Club's third eleven plays Saturday league matches on the broad green at the centre of Lurgashall, and the Noah's Ark Inn overlooks the green. This is the arrangement the village is built around: houses loosely gathered on the grass, the church at one wooded corner, and a pub with a view of the day's fielding.

The Noah's Ark is the place to start and, for many, to end. It is Grade II* listed, an 18th-century front wrapped around a timber-framed core that is probably a century older, with tile hanging and a stone base. Inside there is a real fire, a garden, and a function room. The kitchen changes what it does with the seasons, but examples have included king-prawn, chorizo and Lurgashall wild-garlic linguine, free-range pork belly with Lurgashall apple-and-sage jelly, and a homemade burger with Goodwood cheddar. Greene King IPA and St Austell Tribute are the regular cask ales. Dogs are welcome. One recent visitor, unpersuaded by the welcome, still allowed that the surroundings were very pretty, which is a fair summary of the place either way.

The Community Shop and St Laurence

Across the green is the village shop and Post Office, which the community owns and reopened in March 2018 after villagers formed an action group to save it. A shop of some kind has traded on this spot for almost two hundred years; Mary and James Chalwin were keeping it by 1841, and postal services arrived a decade later. Now it sells bread and eggs, meat, fruit and vegetables, wine and beer, cakes and sausage rolls, with local names behind much of it: Crossways for fruit, Young's for meat, Crosbie's for cakes, Blackdown for wine. You can take a tea or coffee outside and drink it facing the grass.

St Laurence stands at the wooded edge of the green. The nave is 11th-century, and there is early herringbone masonry and a blocked round-headed north doorway to prove it. The south-east tower is late medieval; the spire came back around 1970, having been absent when Ian Nairn saw the church in the early sixties. Inside are a square Sussex-marble font dated 1661, a rare 15th- or 16th-century timber lean-to, probably once partly a schoolroom, and a 1952 window by F. W. Skeat showing Christ among children, one of whom is holding a cricket bat. A brass lectern remembers Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who worshipped here.

Black Down and Tennyson's View

Tennyson is one reason Black Down draws walkers up out of the village. It rises immediately to the north and is the highest point in the South Downs National Park, a mix of purple heather, pine, ancient woodland and sunken droveways. From the National Trust car park on Tennyson's Lane, the Temple of the Winds trail is an easy two miles across heath and bog ponds to a curved stone seat and a wide view over the Weald. Livestock graze, so keep dogs on leads. Tennyson knew the outlook: "Green Sussex fading into blue with one grey glimpse of sea."

The Winery That Was

For years the village made drink as well as farmed it. Lurgashall Winery, founded in 1985 in 17th-century farm buildings, once turned out something like 400,000 bottles a year of mead, fruit liqueur and fruit wine, including a Rose Petal Wine that sold in Japan. It has since closed.

Minor Lanes and a Slow Village Circuit

Lurgashall keeps to minor lanes; Haslemere station is about six miles and a fifteen-minute drive, and on Tuesdays the Midhurst community bus stops at the shop, leaving at half past nine and back by lunch. Petworth House and the Cowdray ruins are each about six miles off. But the village itself asks little of you beyond a slow circuit of the green, a pint watched over the boundary rope, and the walk up the hill that a poet made famous.