Stedham

Thai Flavours by the Rother

The Hamilton Arms looks like an ordinary rural pub until you get to the menu, which runs to more than a hundred Thai dishes. Pud Thai comes with shrimp, beansprouts, peanut, egg and salted turnip; Kao Nah Ped is roast duck with rice, pickled ginger and cucumber; Mie Grob is crispy noodles with shrimp and herbs. There are English bar snacks and real ale as well, and the kitchen trades under a second name, Nava Thai, for takeaway. The pub does live music and keeps rooms upstairs, and it welcomes pets and children. It is the only place in the village to eat.

That building stands in Stedham, in the South Downs National Park about two miles west of Midhurst and set back half a mile from the A272. The name comes from the Old English for steed and water meadow — the watermeadow where stallions graze. The River Rother moves slowly past a green, cottages, a tree-ringed sports field and an arched bridge. Describing the place away from the main road, the parish council calls it "mercifully tranquil."

Heathland Paths and Older Stones

The walking starts immediately to the west, on Iping and Stedham Commons. The short loop is a mile or two of mostly level sandy ground, a Miles Without Stiles route suitable for pushchairs, wheelchairs and mobility scooters, though uneven in places. It crosses open lowland heath, passes two Bronze Age burial mounds and a sculpture called Dragonflies Rest, and holds all five of the heathland dragonfly species found in southern Britain. In June and July you may see silver-studded blue butterflies. This is an SSSI, home also to woodlark and Dartford warbler, and the long-distance Serpent Trail runs across it, so you can sample the route without walking all sixty-five miles. For a full day, the Woolbeding and Easebourne circular follows the Rother for ten or eleven miles past Stedham Mill and the Cowdray ruins.

The Parish Church of St James was built in 1850 by Joseph Butler of Chichester, on the site of a church of 1040, but he kept the tower dated 1673. Three cross-carved stones from the older building are set into the Hythe-sandstone walls. Inside there is a circular stone font, box pews, a hexagonal pulpit and wall monuments, one of them to the Revd Thomas Wrench, who died in 1778. The yew in the churchyard is reckoned locally at around 2,500 years old.

From Domesday Mills to Vanished Shops

In 1086 the Domesday surveyors counted 49 households here, putting Stedham among the largest fifth of settlements they recorded, with three mills, one church and a value of twelve pounds. It had been worth fifteen before the Conquest. By 1841 the village had 557 people, a forge and a flour mill, and by the end of the century it had gathered four shops, a post office, a school and a bakery. None of the shops survive; the Old Ale House on The Street was once a pub and is now a house, its porch converted to a sash window.

Reaching Stedham through Midhurst

There is no station — Petersfield is about eight and a half miles off, Haslemere about eleven — but the Stagecoach 91 and 92 stop opposite Iping Lane, and the volunteer Midhurst Yellow Bus runs on Monday and Friday mornings. Midhurst, two miles east, has the shops and the National Park visitor centre.

The Scrimgeour Legacy

Several of the village's amenities came from one family. John Scrimgeour, the early-20th-century lord of the manor, laid on the first pumped water, put hot baths and a reading room into the village, and built the hall that became the Memorial Hall after the war. He died in 1925, and aubretia, his favourite flower, grows in almost every garden in his memory. It still comes up each spring.