The Rising Sun stands at the Milland crossroads with three bars, three open fires and a garden that runs to an acre, plus a heated lodge in the grounds that is dressed up as a ski lodge each winter. The kitchen leans local and seasonal: crispy squid with Himalayan salt, Szechuan pepper and chilli jam; a warm bacon, maple and mustard Scotch egg; slow-roast pork belly with cider gravy and burnt-apple ketchup; a handmade beef-shin, Guinness and chestnut-mushroom pie. Fuller's Chiswick Bitter and London Pride are the regular cask ales. The landlord, Ben Burston, has twice won Fuller's Griffin Trophy for the brewery's best village pub. Dogs are welcome, though not in the dining room from Monday to Saturday.
The building is brick rather than the stone you might expect. The older stone pub was pulled down and rebuilt in the 1930s in anticipation of the London-Portsmouth road being diverted through the valley. The road went elsewhere.
In the village is Milland Stores, a purpose-built community shop and café that the actor Hugh Bonneville opened in December 2011, after the village had gone about thirty years without a shop of any kind. It was built from scratch, not rescued: an oak-framed building with a ground-source heat pump and, since 2022, solar panels on the roof. It carries everyday basics and local produce, will order in bread, vegetables, fruit and meat, and serves coffee, cake and light lunches. Staff and volunteers run it between them.
Milland sits in a broad, secluded clay vale the locals simply call the Valley, almost ringed by wooded greensand ridges: Milland Hill to the north, Iron Hill to the east, the Telegraph, Titty and Stubb hills to the south. Springs feed a scatter of ponds — Folly Pond, Cooks Pond, Durrants Pond — several left over from old hammer or mill workings, draining into Hammer Stream and on to the River Rother. The lanes are narrow and hedged, opening onto changing views of fields, woods and the enclosing hangers.
For walking, the Serpent Trail crosses the parish on its way over the greensand heaths and can be taken in manageable stretches, from Combe Hill through Rondle Wood, or from Borden over Titty Hill to Woolbeding. A longer loop of about seven and a quarter miles from Liphook station takes in Milland Place, the Hammer Stream and the village centre, mostly on forest paths that can be muddy.
Liphook, roughly three kilometres north, is the nearest station, on South Western Railway. The bus is Stagecoach's route 93 between Midhurst and Petersfield, now down to a single journey each way from Monday to Saturday, so it is worth checking the timetable before you plan around it.
The church of St Luke, built in 1879-80 in a plain Perpendicular style, holds two stained-glass windows by Christopher Whall, six Taylor bells cast in 1886, and a circular font thought to be Saxon that was found buried in the churchyard. Beside it stands the older building it replaced, Tuxlith Chapel, whose rubble walls, herringbone masonry and blocked round-headed window belong to late-eleventh-century fabric, later altered. It fell into disrepair in the 1930s, passed to the Friends of Friendless Churches in 1974, and was refitted in 1993. It sits on a wooded hilltop reached from the valley by seventy-six old stone steps. Pevsner set the two side by side and called the pairing "a very telling contrast between true piety and 19th-century religious advertisement."
The valley has been worked for a long time. A Roman road between Chichester and Silchester ran through it, and from the sixteenth century the streams powered an iron industry whose hammer ponds still shape the wet ground. Brick and tile came later, the Booker family's Cartersland brickworks near Pennels Bridge smoking away until the late 1930s.
For days out, Hollycombe Steam in the Country is close by at Iron Hill, a traditional fairground with Golden Gallopers, steam swing boats and working steam railways, open on a limited seasonal calendar. Midhurst and the Cowdray ruins make a natural drive, and Woolbeding Gardens can be visited by advance booking and a minibus from the town.
Behind the memorial hall there is a recreation field with a football pitch, a fenced play area for younger children and an activity trail for older ones, and two hard tennis courts, available pay-and-play with access arranged through the village shop.