At the Harrow Inn, beer comes from casks on a stillage, poured by hand through hatches into two small bars, each about twelve feet square. There is no television, no piped music, no electronic till, and a stone-flagged floor worn smooth under an inglenook. CAMRA calls the interior one of outstanding national historic importance, and gives it the full three stars. The kitchen runs off an old Rayburn, and the thing to order is the Harrow pea-and-ham soup, which the pub has made its own. Arthur Dodd bought the place in 1932, and it was still in the family in early 2026, run by his descendants Claire and Nisa McCutcheon. It sits where six lanes meet, some of them old cattle-droving routes, with a detached toilet block across the road that you cross in whatever weather is going.
The other pub is a different proposition. The Cricketers Inn has bedrooms, a chef the pub names as Nick, and a kitchen leaning on Hampshire farms for its meat and dairy. You might have a crispy poached egg with chorizo jam and smoked mash, a steak sandwich with red-onion jam, or battered South Coast pollock with crushed minted peas, and finish with sticky toffee pudding under New Forest vanilla ice cream. Wednesdays bring wood-fired pizza, and there is pavilion seating outside for the summer. Dogs are welcome.
Steep keeps no shop of its own, which tells you what kind of place this is. Steep is a scatter of houses on rising ground north-east of Petersfield, its lanes threading between beech hangers, hill clearings and low valleys that turn boggy after rain. The whole parish sits inside the South Downs National Park, climbing from around 250 to 800 feet, and Hampshire County Council calls the country here "Little Switzerland".
You walk to earn that. The Hangers Way runs 21 miles from Alton to Queen Elizabeth Country Park, and the stretch from Hawkley into Steep is three and a half miles of the best of it, an hour or two depending on how often you stop. It crosses a stream to medieval Oakshott, makes its steepest pull up Shoulder of Mutton Hill, and drops through boggy Lutcombe Bottom to the church.
On that hill stands a Wiltshire sarsen with a bronze plaque, the Poet's Stone, unveiled in 1937 by Lord Horder after the Poet Laureate John Masefield had spoken. It marks Edward Thomas, who lived around Steep and Froxfield from 1906 until 1916 and took much of his poetry from these slopes before he was killed at Arras in 1917. The plaque carries a line of his prose: "AND I ROSE UP AND KNEW THAT I WAS TIRED AND CONTINUED MY JOURNEY."
All Saints' has stood at the foot of the walk since the twelfth century, with cylindrical columns, scalloped capitals and a hexagonal fourteenth-century font. Its two clear-glass windows, engraved by Laurence Whistler in 1978, also remember Thomas; one was smashed in a burglary in 2010 and replaced, and the fragments of the old one are kept on show. In September 2025, more than two hundred people joined hands around the building to mark its 900th year. The organiser, Trevor Hines, called it "the jewel in the crown of Steep".
Petersfield and its mainline station are about two miles off, the other side of the A3, with its museum holding the Tim Wilton-Steer Collection of Thomas material. Village buses run only a limited service, and most visitors come by car. What Steep gives back is quieter: a hillside, a hand-drawn pint, and a valley that once grew orchards of Cox's Orange Pippins.