Thomas Lord is buried in the churchyard of St John the Evangelist. He founded Lord's Cricket Ground, retired to West Meon in 1830, and died here in January 1832. The church standing over him is not the one he would have known: the older Saxon-Norman building was cleared and replaced in the 1840s to a design by George Gilbert Scott, in squared knapped flint with Bath-stone dressings and a three-stage west tower. Inside are the carved Royal Arms of 1712 and an ornamented octagonal font. The other set of ashes in the churchyard belongs to Guy Burgess, the spy.
The Thomas Lord is a restored village inn with rooms, a garden with guest cabins behind it, and a kitchen that changes its specials daily. The menu runs to chicken satay skewers, salt-baked beetroot with grilled artichoke and cashew ricotta, a smoked-haddock fishcake with leeks, mustard cream and a poached egg, steamed Cornish mussels with focaccia and chips, and sticky bread-and-butter pudding. Dogs get their own menu and their own bedrooms.
The second pub, The West Meon, was until recently the West Meon Hut. It is the informal one: children, dogs, bikers and campers are all accounted for, and it rents two fields for basic camping. The head chef is Joe. Wednesday is an open jam night for local musicians, and most Saturdays bring live music.
On the High Street the community shop doubles as the Post Office and the Cuppacheeno Café, with indoor seating and a courtyard garden. The shelves lean local: Hampshire free-range eggs, chalk-stream trout, Happy Toast Bakery sourdough, Isle of Wight tomatoes, Hambledon and Exton Park sparkling wines, East Meon gin and Summerdown peppermint chocolates. Smiths, the butcher, cuts and trims meat to order and supplies the pubs and cafés around it.
The village sits on the upper River Meon, a shallow, clear chalk stream that holds otter, water vole, brown trout and kingfisher, in a narrow valley with chalk downland rising steeply on both sides. The A32, once the Gosport–Alton turnpike, drops sharply through the trees from the north and runs straight through the middle. The conservation appraisal puts it plainly: "The tranquillity of the settlement is compromised by the A32 which runs through the centre of the village."
The walking starts at the old station. The Meon Valley Railway reached West Meon in 1903 and carried passengers until 1955; the viaduct has been taken down, leaving abutments and concrete piers, and the trackbed is now the Meon Valley Trail — eleven flat, stile-free miles to Wickham, wide enough for pushchairs and mobility scooters as well as bikes and horses. Parking is off Station Road. The trail meets the South Downs Way and the Wayfarer's Walk, and a short detour climbs Old Winchester Hill for views down the valley and the chance of a red kite overhead; grazing sheep up there mean dogs on a short lead.
There is older history if you want it. Athelstan gave twelve hides of land here to a thegn in 932, and the Domesday commissioners counted fifty households and two mills. Garden Cottage, still lived in, began as a timber hall house in 1441.
Petersfield, the nearest town and station, is about six miles east; the number 67 bus runs there and on to Winchester, Monday to Saturday, with its frequency a recurring local complaint. Come back down to the community shop afterwards and take a coffee out to the courtyard, where the café keeps a welcome for dogs and cyclists — the one corner of West Meon the main road leaves in peace.