Stoughton

Fires at the Village Heart

The Hare & Hounds keeps two winter fires going, one in the dining room and one in the separate public bar where the locals drink. The floors are stone-flagged, the furniture is plain, and the pub has been the centre of Stoughton since the nineteenth century. Dogs are welcome. Out the back there is a paved patio and a rear garden, and the bar pours Flower Pots Perridge Pale, Long Man Best Bitter and Otter Amber as its regulars.

The kitchen leans on the wood oven: wood-fired pizzas, roasted meats, haddock chowder with local sourdough, bouillabaisse and local game. Recent plates have run to venison pie, rump steak, ribs, curry, risotto and duck spring rolls. On a busy Sunday the kitchen can slow.

From Stoughton to the Ancient Yews

The walking route into Kingley Vale begins at the village noticeboard. The circuit from the noticeboard and back is about four miles and an hour and a half, a steep climb with no stiles or gates. It passes a memorial to Bolesław Własnowolski, a 23-year-old Polish pilot officer with 213 Squadron whose Hurricane was shot down after combat with a Messerschmitt in November 1940; his family were there when the granite memorial was unveiled in 1997. The path also crosses a polo field once used by Lord Mountbatten and passes the Tansley Stone, named for the ecologist who helped create the reserve, before reaching the Devil's Humps.

The Devil's Humps are Bronze Age barrows on Bow Hill. The two largest are 24 and 28 metres across, their crowns hollowed by diggers in 1853. Above them the yews begin. Kingley Vale holds Britain's largest ancient yew forest, and perhaps one of the finest in western Europe. Some trees are more than five hundred years old and over five metres round, and Natural England counts thirty-nine of England's fifty-eight breeding butterfly species here, with red kites, buzzards and peregrines over the coombe. "Beneath the dense canopy, it's easy to see why humans have been enchanted by the site as it feels like you've entered another world," says reserve manager Rachel Guy. From the top you can see the South Coast and the spire of Chichester Cathedral.

Leads, Flint and Norman Stone

Take a lead — dogs must be on one all year because of grazing stock — and don't count on a phone signal.

St Mary's stands at the top of the village's steep approach. It is cruciform, largely eleventh-century in its chancel and transepts, with a thirteenth-century nave and a tower made in the fourteenth century by converting the south transept. Inside are a fine Norman chancel arch and a thirteenth-century trefoil-headed piscina. The outside is flint under a skin of Roman cement, with a red-brick porch. It is usually open in daylight; parking is very limited, though the west door gives level access.

Domesday Roots and Day-Out Reach

The Domesday commissioners found ninety-four households here in 1086, along with one church and enough woodland to render sixteen hundred swine, and valued the manor at forty pounds. It belonged then to Earl Roger of Shrewsbury; Earl Godwin had held it before the Conquest.

Getting here means the B2146, a mile east of Walderton, then a minor lane. Chichester is the nearest station for Kingley Vale, and the Stagecoach 54 between there and Petersfield stops on the main road about a mile from the pub, though nothing runs into the reserve. Weald & Downland Living Museum at Singleton, Uppark, Stansted Park and Chichester itself are all within reach for a day out.

Back to the Fires

Come down off Bow Hill in the late afternoon, and the fires at the Hare & Hounds are the first warm thing you meet.