The only way in is down. Newton Valence sits at the end of narrow sunken lanes that drop between high banks of old woodland, and these holloways are the sole vehicular approach from any direction. Dr Francis Rose, surveying the parish, classed many of them as linear ancient woodlands in their own right — strips of trees, insects and plants that happen to have a road at the bottom. You arrive slowly.
The village is a long, thin thing strung through rolling chalk-and-clay country of pasture, arable and woodland. At its centre stands St Mary's, whose flint walls and lancet windows carry fabric from the 12th and 13th centuries onto Saxon foundations, with 15th-century work above and a west tower raised in 1813. Inside there is a Norman pillar piscina at the east end and the church's old Norman font, recovered and now standing in the north-west chapel. Beside it, the Manor House and Old Manor — late-Tudor timber framing and a large chimney breast — are two private homes rather than anything you can visit.
What Newton Valence does not have is a public pub or a shop. The 18th-century Horse and Groom, which stood beside the A32, burned down; the old shop and post office merged around 1968 and later closed, and the former school is now a house. The one communal room left, besides the church, is the village hall — a building that opened as a school in 1877, taught 635 children before closing in 1927, and was revived as a community centre in the early 1990s by a local builder, Mike Buckland. Its Sports and Social Club runs a Friday bar, quizzes, live music and summer barbecues for members, with a garden used on fine evenings.
For a proper pub you drive the two miles to Selborne, where Nick and Hayley Carter have run the Selborne Arms since 2001. The two bars are named the Hanger and the Zig Zag, after the local hill and Gilbert White's path up it, and the kitchen runs from battered haddock with chips and mushy peas to smoked-duck salad with Winchester cheese, ham, egg and chips, a lentil-and-spinach burger, roast sirloin on Sundays and homemade chocolate brownie. Ringwood Fortyniner and Bowman Swift One pour alongside guest ales. The large garden has a children's play area and a gazebo with a wood-burning stove; dogs are welcome except at the bar and in carpeted areas.
Selborne is also where you find coffee and cake — La Luna does sandwiches and hot drinks, White's Café sits at Gilbert White's House — and Selborne Pottery, where you can watch the potters at their wheels. The house keeps the naturalist's home and garden, the Oates Collections, and a brewery and taproom. White knew this whole landscape closely: he called the Newton Valence down "a pleasing park-like spot," and Noar Hill "a noble chalk promontory, remarkable for sending two streams into two different seas."
The walking is the reason to stay. Country roads and a bridleway lead from the village to Selborne Common, where a two-mile trail winds through beech hanger and flower meadow in the National Trust's care; that approach floods and turns to mud in wet spells. Noar Hill, a reserve in old medieval chalk pits, has pyramidal orchids and butterflies in summer and glow-worms at midsummer, on steep unsurfaced ground. The longer route in Gilbert White's footsteps takes in woodland, common and the hedged Zig Zag.
The Domesday surveyors valued the place at twelve pounds in 1086, down from fifteen twenty years before, and counted two mills, woodland enough for a hundred swine, and one church. In 1249 Henry III handed the manor to his half-brother William de Valence, and the second half of the name has stuck ever since.
Getting here means Alton, about five miles north, for the train and the weekly shop; a twice-weekly taxishare bus reaches the War Memorial on Tuesdays and Fridays. And every spring the village closes Hullam Lane, because more than a thousand toads come down it to reach their breeding ponds.