The White Horse stands opposite the church on the A272, a 16th-century inn with oak beams, flagstone floors and log fires, and four rooms upstairs if you want to stay put. It is Rogate's pub, and since the old Wyndham Arms stopped pulling pints it is the only one. Harvey's Sussex Best Bitter is one of two regular ales, with a changing beer alongside them, so it's worth checking what's on the pumps. There is a terrace and a garden beside the green, and the pub is glad to have dogs.
Behind it lie the village sports field and a public play park, where you can watch cricket or football depending on the season. The White Horse keeps company with the local darts, football, tennis and bowls clubs and a golf society, which is a lot of organised sport for a village this size.
Durleighmarsh Farm Shop, just west on Rogate Road, supplies much of the village's provisions. It is family-run, with pick-your-own in season and shelves of fruit and vegetables from the farm's own fields, filled out with food from other local producers.
St Bartholomew's, across the road from the pub, is Grade I listed and largely 13th-century, though a round Norman arch of about 1150 survives inside. Its most striking feature is the timber tower, a massive framed structure carrying a shingled bell-turret and dated to around 1330. During the 1874 rebuilding the whole tower was taken apart piece by piece and re-erected farther west. Moving it exposed a wall painting thought to show the Good Shepherd; only faint feet remain.
The land around the village is river meadow, pasture and hedgerow beneath wooded greensand hills, in the Western Rother Valley inside the South Downs National Park. The National Park Authority invites walkers to "explore patchwork fields, peaceful villages and the scenic River Rother," and its Rogate circular does exactly that: a moderate seven to eight miles, three to four hours, following the Rother and a stretch of the Serpent Trail past Durleighmarsh Farm, Durford Mill and Wenham Edge. Willow and alder line the water, and there is a chance of kingfisher, heron or otter. The Serpent Trail itself runs 65 miles across the heaths, where you may spot adders, lizards and silver-studded blue butterflies.
The walk passes the old Rogate station at Nyewood, on the parish boundary. The Petersfield-to-Midhurst line opened in 1864 and closed in 1955, and the station building still stands. There was an earlier industry too: Tudor iron furnaces and hammers once worked here, supplying the growing Portsmouth naval dockyard until northern coalfields undercut them.
Petersfield, about five miles west, has the nearest station and a museum in the former police station and courthouse on St Peter's Road. Midhurst is six miles east, near the fire-gutted Tudor ruins of Cowdray, and Uppark sits above South Harting to the south, a National Trust house with long views over the Downs. The A272 threads all of this together through the narrow village centre, and Stagecoach route 54 runs between Petersfield and Chichester, calling at Rogate along the way.
Inside the church, one name on the war memorial is Cicily Elger, who nursed wounded soldiers when a nearby house became a temporary hospital during the First World War. She is the only woman, and the only civilian, recorded there.