A steep wooded hill rises immediately behind the village, and a chalk path climbs it in tight switchbacks. Gilbert White's brother John cut this Zig-Zag in 1752; White added a gentler route, the Bostal, in 1780. At the top sits a sarsen boulder known as the wishing stone, beside the platforms of a vanished hermitage. It is a short climb, and the reward is the view back down over the roofs.
Selborne runs in a single line along the B3006 between Alton and Petersfield, its houses built from local malmstone under thatch, many with chips of ironstone set into the mortar. At the centre is The Plestor, a small green whose name means "play place", between the church and The Wakes.
The Selborne Arms sits below the Hanger. Nick and Hayley Carter have run it since January 2001, and the building is older than it lets on: a plan wrapped around a massive central chimney, dating from about 1600. The kitchen leans on local produce — homemade Welsh rarebit with green-tomato chutney, a sweet-onion, wild-rocket and goat's-cheese cheesecake, battered haddock with chips and mushy peas, steak-and-ale pie, smoked-duck salad, and sticky toffee pudding to finish. Ringwood Fortyniner and Bowman Swift One head the beer list, alongside three guest ales. The garden is large and has a play area for children.
The pub became a beerhouse in the 1870s. In the spring of 1913, while magistrates decided which of Selborne's three licensed premises to close, a constable made twenty-six visits and counted 515 customers across February and March. The White Hart closed. The Arms survived, and its old hop kiln stood where the public toilets are now.
Across the village, the Jubilee Tap pours Gilbert White beers from the brewery beside it, with other local beers, wine and cocktails, and tapas and platters alongside. The brewhouse it faces was built by White himself in 1765.
For coffee there is La Luna, which bakes its own baguettes and cakes, keeps gluten-free and vegan options, and sells books, toys and garden things alongside. White's Café, inside Gilbert White's House, does breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea and doubles as the village shop. On The Plestor, Robert Goldsmith throws and decorates stoneware at Selborne Pottery, glazed in deep blue and red.
The Church of St Mary is late-Norman at its core, its nave and chancel built around 1180, with round arches on cylindrical columns and a plain twelfth-century font. Two Flemish paintings hang inside, a triptych of about 1510 and a Descent from the Cross of around 1520. A window of 1920 shows St Francis preaching to the birds, and it includes every species White named in his book.
White spent most of his life at The Wakes, making close observations of ordinary wildlife. He wrote the first description of a harvest mouse and told the chiffchaff, willow warbler and wood warbler apart by song alone. In 1780 he inherited a tortoise called Timothy from his aunt; Timothy turned out to be female, and her shell is now in the Natural History Museum in London. His Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne appeared in 1789. The house became a museum in 1955 and now holds two collections under one roof, White's and the Oates family's — Frank Oates the explorer, and Captain Lawrence Oates of the Terra Nova Antarctic expedition.
Most guests come for the walking. The Hangers Way runs 21 miles from Alton to Queen Elizabeth Country Park; shorter loops cross Selborne Common, 267 acres of beech wood and meadow held by the National Trust, or drop through the Lythes to three ponds in the Oakhanger valley. On the Common, dogs must be leashed between March and September, when ground-nesting birds and grazing cattle share the ground. Alton, the nearest station, is three miles off, and the Stagecoach 38 links it to the village and on through Chawton, where Jane Austen's house stands, to Petersfield. The bus does not run often.
White wrote as attentively about earthworms as about birds. "Earthworms," he noted, "though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm." He lies in the churchyard under a small stone marked only GW.