Antiques and rustic memorabilia cover the walls of the Half Moon, described by a walking guide as a fifteenth-century former coaching inn on what is now the A283. Keith Sandieson has run it for a long time; in August 2022 he marked forty years as landlord. The food is home-cooked and the one cask beer is Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter, a Sussex session bitter that suits the room. One visitor last year called it "like stepping back in time, in a good way," which is about right.
There is a garden and a rear patio, and if you go in you may be met by Whisky, the owner's young Shih Tzu, who has taken over the role an older pub dog called Rex once held. Dog owners report a friendly reception, though it's worth checking ahead.
The village runs in a line along the A283, which threads north to south between Chiddingfold and Petworth through a centre of timber-framed, Georgian and Victorian houses gathered around the green and the church. The whole parish covers three and a half thousand acres of Low Weald clay, most of it inside the South Downs National Park, and Black Down frames the western horizon.
St Michael's is built of Wealden sandstone in the Gothic style. The west tower dates from the early nineteenth century; the chancel, nave and south porch were added in 1877 by Anthony Salvin. It shares its clergy now with Ebernoe and Lurgashall in a combined benefice.
For walking, a seven-mile loop starts at the village hall and crosses crop fields, Frith Wood and the large mill lake at Shillinglee Park before returning through meadow, oak, gorse and birch, with views out to Black Down. It is graded easy, though you are warned of a hidden marsh, storm-felled trees and the odd crop grown across the path. Two miles west, Black Down itself is the highest point in the South Downs National Park; a short National Trust trail climbs to the Temple of the Winds, a curved stone seat set above a notable South Downs view.
South down the same road is Petworth House, a seventeenth-century house holding works by Van Dyck, Turner and Gainsborough, set in seven hundred acres of Capability Brown deer park with two lakes.
The name records what the place used to be: the chapel north of Petworth, which became a parish of its own in 1691. The surrounding woods once fed Tudor ironworking, glass-making, quarrying, coppicing and brickmaking, and the Old Forge, timber-framed and tile-hung, dates from the seventeenth century or earlier. Northchapel was also the home of the Society of Dependants, a dissenting group founded by John Sirgood and better known as the Cokelers, who lived communally above their combination stores with their chapel behind. The nickname was said to come from Sirgood's preference for cocoa over beer, though nobody is quite sure.
Haslemere station is about five miles by road, on South Western Railway with step-free platforms; the Waverley Hoppa bus runs there on Tuesdays and Thursdays only, so a car helps. The village hall keeps its own timetable of fitness classes, dog training, film shows and children's parties, and the playground down the road had its surfacing repaired beneath the new slide.