Steep

Two very different pubs

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. The interior has a three-star heritage rating. The kitchen runs off an old Rayburn, and the house speciality is pea-and-ham soup. The Dodd and McCutcheon families have run the pub since 1932 and bought it from Whitbread in 1991; sisters Claire and Nisa McCutcheon now run it. The pub stands where six lanes meet, some of them old cattle-droving routes, with a detached toilet block across the lane.

The Cricketers Inn has bedrooms, while chef Nick's kitchen uses meat and dairy from nearby farms. 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 the heated, sheltered Winter Pavilion seats more than 16. Dogs are welcome.

A scattered village, a hard-earned walk

Steep is a dispersed settlement on rising ground north-east of Petersfield, with lanes threading between beech hangers, hill clearings and low valleys that turn boggy after rain. The parish lies inside the South Downs National Park, climbing from around 250 to 800 feet, and the landscape is a small "Little Switzerland" of wooded slopes and open clearings.

The Hangers Way runs 21 miles from Alton to Queen Elizabeth Country Park. The three-and-a-half-mile stretch from Hawkley into Steep crosses a stream to medieval Oakshott, climbs Shoulder of Mutton Hill, and drops through boggy Lutcombe Bottom to the church. Allow an hour or two, depending on how often you stop.

Edward Thomas on the hill

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."

Nine centuries at All Saints'

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. Two clear-glass windows, engraved by Laurence Whistler in 1978, also remember Thomas; one was smashed in a burglary in 2010 and replaced, and fragments of the old window remain on show. In September 2025, more than two hundred people joined hands around the building to mark the church's 900th year. Organiser Trevor Hines called it "the jewel in the crown of Steep".

Petersfield beyond the A3

Petersfield and the mainline station are about two miles from Steep, beyond the A3. Petersfield Museum holds the Tim Wilton-Steer Collection of Thomas material. Village buses run only a limited service. What Steep gives back is quieter: a hillside, a hand-drawn pint, and a valley that once grew orchards of Cox's Orange Pippins.