Farnham

Cobbett, Pubs and Old Shopfronts

On Bridge Square there is a pub called The William Cobbett. It was once the Jolly Farmer, and in 1763 the radical MP, journalist and farmer William Cobbett was born in it. The renaming came later, in his honour, which is a rare case of a village pub outliving the man it fed and then taking his name. You can still drink there.

The rest of Farnham's pubs are easy to sort by what you want from an evening. The Hop Blossom, a Fuller's house on Long Garden Walk, is named for the hop trade that ran the town for three and a half centuries. The Nelson Arms is a 17th-century building, said to have been part of the castle once, and it serves traditional British food. The Queen's Head does pie nights on Mondays and steak nights on Wednesdays. The Plough runs live music and quiz nights. If you drive a few miles out, the Six Bells keeps more than forty gins, a garden and a skittle alley, and the Windmill is run by the community that drinks in it.

Markets, the Wey and Waverley

The shops are older than most towns' oldest buildings. Pullingers, an art and craft shop, has traded since 1850 and is the oldest surviving business in Farnham. Elphicks, an independent department store, opened in 1881. Rangers, selling furnishings, dates to 1895. Squires Kitchen Shop stocks baking and cake-decorating equipment for people who take it seriously. A farmers' market fills the central car park once a month, and the Maltings holds a monthly market for arts, crafts and antiques.

Walk down to the River Wey and you can follow it about two miles southeast to Waverley Abbey, the first Cistercian abbey in England, founded in 1128. The ruins are free to visit, and beside them stands a yew nearly five hundred years old that was named UK Tree of the Year in 2022. The North Downs Way begins here too, at the western end of the Downs, and the heathland at Frensham Common lies a few miles south, with a sandy swimming beach and medieval fishponds dug for the Bishop of Winchester.

Church Glass and Castle Camouflage

St Andrew's is a Grade I church with Saxon foundations uncovered in 2005, and its east window has looked the same since the chancel was consecrated in 1399. The glass came later, designed by Augustus Pugin in 1851. Cobbett is buried in the churchyard, opposite the doorway, back where he started.

Farnham Castle sits above the town, a Norman motte-and-bailey nearly nine hundred years old; the shell keep is free to enter. During the war its rooms held the Camouflage Development and Training Centre, where the artist Roland Penrose and the stage magician Jasper Maskelyne taught soldiers how not to be seen.

Rails, Roads and the Old Corn Market

Trains run direct to London Waterloo from the station, which opened in 1848. The A31 handles the rest. When Daniel Defoe passed through, he called it "the greatest corn-market after London," counting eleven hundred laden wagons on a single market day.

Gostrey Meadow at the Centre

In the middle of it all is Gostrey Meadow, a strip of riverside grass with a children's playground, where the Wey runs past the same way it did when the wagons came.