The White Lion stands beside the green, across from the Church of St Peter, and reopened in June 2026 after a £108,000 refurbishment. Allan Marks had been its licensee for fifteen years by the time the doors opened again. The relaunch menu runs to burgers, pies, fish and chips, tuna steak, lime-and-coriander chicken and a spring-green lasagne, all cooked on site. Dogs are welcome in the bar and the outside seating but not the restaurant, and the cask range rotates through beers from Bowmans Brewery, up the valley at Droxford. The building is Grade II listed, painted brick under tiled roofs, eighteenth and nineteenth century.
The reopening plans ran to a weekly meat raffle and support for the village fete and the church barbecues.
South at Soberton Heath, the Bold Forester takes a broader run at dinner: Mediterranean vegetable Wellington, bangers and mash, barbecue ribs, a halloumi burger, macaroni cheese, a homemade pie of the day, and a charcuterie board or ploughman's if you would rather graze. Family- and dog-friendly, with local ales.
For groceries, a car may be convenient, since there is no shop in the village itself; Meonstoke Post Office and Stores, along the valley, is on the community bus route.
The parish is less a village than a five-mile chain of them — Soberton, Soberton Heath and Newtown — strung along the Meon. The river here is a chalk stream, clear enough to hold brown trout, and if you are patient you may catch a kingfisher or the wake of a water vole; otters use it too. The north of the parish, taking in the Forest of Bere, sits inside the South Downs National Park.
Walkers have two obvious choices. The Soberton and Newtown Millennium Walk is a ten-mile circle from St Peter's, following the Wayfarers Walk through Upperford Copse, the hamlet of Newtown and the water meadows, with a stiff climb early and a fair count of stiles and gates. The Meon Valley Trail is the gentler one: eleven flat, stile-free miles along the old Fareham-to-Alton railway between West Meon and Wickham, wide enough for pushchairs and mobility scooters, about six hours end to end.
The Church of St Peter is Grade I, Norman in origin and mostly thirteenth century, built of flint, with a west tower added in 1525. Inside there is an arcade on octagonal columns, a chancel arch of around 1300, and the Curle Chapel in the south transept with its fifteenth-century tomb. Outside the same transept sits a stone sarcophagus, probably Roman, dug up somewhere nearby and left where it was set down.
The churchyard holds James Stares, a Soberton labourer murdered on Cams Hill on 21 August 1782 as he walked home from collecting his wages. His companion, the blacksmith John Taylor, was hanged for it, convicted partly on a bloodstained smock that Taylor's own mother recognised. Stares's family raised the Murder Stone at the spot, its inscription now worn away. "Let future generations know," it is said to have begun.
Getting here means the A32, with public transport limited; Botley station is about six miles off in a straight line, and the volunteer community bus reaches the village hall on Wednesdays, Fridays and Mondays, and not otherwise. Bishop's Waltham Palace, the free-to-enter ruin of the medieval Bishops of Winchester's residence, is close enough for a wet afternoon.
The village hall's programme has included table tennis, Pilates and the folk association, and twice a year the Soberton Players put on a show — details worth confirming before you go.