Privett

The Nicholson Spire

A 160-foot stone spire rises out of the beech woods before you reach anything else, and for a hamlet this size that is a great deal of spire. It belongs to Holy Trinity, built between 1876 and 1878 by Sir Arthur Blomfield and paid for, to the tune of £22,000, by William Nicholson: local landowner, Member of Parliament and gin distiller. He had bought nearby Basing Park in 1863, and much of what you see around you is his doing, including the flint cottages he raised for estate workers and the schoolhouse. The house at Basing Park is gone. The spire he financed is visible for miles.

Inside, the church runs to Italian marble mosaic floors, stone carving and a reredos by Farmer and Brindley, a Mansfield-stone font, stained glass largely by Heaton, Butler and Bayne, and eight bells cast in 1877 by Mears and Stainbank. By the 1960s the congregation had shrunk to the point where it kept to the south transept, and the organ and pews were sold off. The church was declared redundant in 1980 and is now cared for by the Churches Conservation Trust, which calls it "a Victorian jewel set in beautiful countryside." A memorial inside records Godfrey Nicholson, the family's managing director, who died at twenty-nine in 1901 after climbing into a disused well at the Three Mills distillery to reach a worker overcome by gas. The same act is remembered on a tile in London's Postman's Park.

Two Country Food Stops

For food and a bed, the Angel Hotel sits opposite the old railway station, six miles from both Alton and Petersfield. It has thirty-seven bedrooms and a restaurant that runs from a Sunday carvery of roast sirloin to an 8oz sirloin with a rarebit field mushroom, and lighter things like smoked chicken breast with mango and pomegranate or a prawn cocktail. When it first opened, after the railway arrived, it traded as the Privett Bush.

Closer to the ground is the Old Dairy Tea Rooms at Fawley Farm Feeds on Hempland Lane, a family feed-and-equestrian business going since 1967. Matt and Andrea serve cooked breakfasts and lunches, homemade cakes, cream teas, milkshakes and smoothies, and they are happy to see cyclists, horse riders, dog walkers and dogs.

Tracks Across High Country

The walking is the real draw. Privett sits high in the South Downs National Park, on chalk downland and the Froxfield clay plateau, with an unusual density of tracks and footpaths crossing arable fields, parkland and beech woods. Traffic is light and the population thin, which makes for long horizons and very low light pollution. The poet Edward Thomas knew this ground as "the high land of clay and flint." You will want the Hampshire rights-of-way map rather than a single marked route.

The Railway and the Road Out

The old station is a private house now, so admire it from the road. Trains ran on the Meon Valley line from 1903 until passenger service ended in 1955; its long platforms and refreshment room were unusually ambitious for the remote setting. Petersfield, five miles east down the A272, is the nearest station and the nearest town, with a weekly market and museum. Jane Austen's House at Chawton and the steam trains of the Watercress Line are both possible day trips by car; check directions and opening times before you go.

A Hall at the Heart of Privett

The village hall has stood for over a century, and still puts on film nights, harvest suppers and curry nights.