Directions

1. From the car park of The Jack Russell Inn, turn left in the direction of the hamlet of Netherton. Follow Netherton Lane downhill to the junction, turning right in front of Netherton House onto Netherton Road. This area has connections to the ancestors of George Washington.
2. The lane meets a junction with Upton Road running to the left. On the right is a footpath running uphill on a track. Follow this track. There has been forestry work in this area disrupting the established footpath route a little, but continue on the line you started on, making for the fringe of the copse of trees ahead to eventually join a flat path through woodland.
3. The path emerges onto a stony farm track uphill, with trees to the left and some of the vast tracts of fields of the Faccombe Estate on the other side of the fence to the right. This uphill section is carrying you to one of the higher parts of the walk.
4. The track starts to level out as the farm track emerges onto Rooknests Lane. Continue ahead on the lane. You crossed the Hampshire border into Berkshire on that last climb, and to your left is Combe Hill. At 293 metres it's higher than the county top of Hampshire still to come.
5. As the lane starts to descend you'll see a wide-mouthed path/track to the left that's heading up to Combe Hill, and beyond. To the right is a narrower path in front of a gate. Take this one, following it as it curves between hedges and copses.
6. Go left across the lane and onto a grassy path by the side of fields. There's a steep uphill here, levelling out a little as you enter the woods above the fields, then turning right to join the Wayfarer's Walk.
7. This is where the walk really shows itself off. As you gain elevation towards the summit of Pilot Hill, back in Hampshire, the views to your left are superb, some of the best in Southern England. See if you can spot Stargrove Manor. To the right of this vista is Highclere.
8. As this route along the ridge starts to level and start downhill, look for footpath markers. One path leads down to the left off the ridge. This is where we also leave the Wayfarer's Way, heading right towards the fields - on Brenda Parker Way.
9. Head across the field to the hedge, then left hand turn to the next hedge boundary, and a right hand turn.
10. It's a straight run back to Faccombe from here, initially downhill on a stony track and then up the other side on a smoother track on the approach to the village.
11. Continue on to Faccombe Road where you'll turn left passing the church. St Barnabas’ Church is a 19th‑century estate church that carries the inherited history of the earlier medieval parish at Netherton. Local tradition describes it as an ‘ancestral church of George Washington’, reflecting the Washington family’s historic roots in this part of southern England, even though the present building dates from 1866.
12. On the left you'll pass Faccombe Manor, once the seat of the Butler‑Henderson family (of steam‑locomotive fame), and on to finish at The Jack Russell Inn. 

Notes

Brigadier Landon: The White Sultan of Hampshire

Few rural English villages can claim a former resident whose life involved Gulf monarchies, Cold War intrigue, immense wealth, private jets, royal friendships, a heavily guarded estate and repeated comparisons with Lawrence of Arabia. Faccombe can.

Brigadier Timothy Landon might well be one of the most extraordinary figures ever to settle quietly into the Hampshire countryside. Depending on which account you read, he was variously described as an intelligence officer, military adviser, royal fixer, trusted confidant, arms broker, strategic operator, moderniser, adventurer and deeply private landowner. Quite a range for someone who became best known in these parts simply as "the Brigadier."

The story begins at Sandhurst in the early 1960s, where a young cadet from Vancouver Island named Timothy Landon reportedly took a younger fellow student under his wing, shielding him from the casual bullying of officer training. That student was Qaboos bin Said, son of the Sultan of Oman. It was the beginning of a friendship that would reshape a country.

Landon arrived in Oman in the mid-1960s as a British Army intelligence officer, part of a military operation to help suppress a Soviet-backed insurgency in Dhofar. By the time he arrived, the old Sultan — isolationist, paranoid, resistant to the oil wealth transforming the rest of the Gulf — had placed his own son under house arrest on the coast. Landon was one of the few outsiders permitted to visit.

When the coup came, on 23 July 1970, Landon was twenty-seven years old. The old Sultan was confronted at his palace and told his rule was at an end; the only casualty was Said's own foot, shot accidentally as he reached for a pistol beneath his robe. He died two years later in a London hotel. His one recorded regret, made on his deathbed, was that he had not had Landon killed.

Qaboos modernised Oman rapidly, and Landon stayed close to him through the following decade — advising, brokering, building the new Sultan's armed forces into one of the best-equipped small militaries in the world.

He was dubbed the White Sultan, a title he seemed to have regarded with bemusement. His wealth, assembled through commissions, gifts and investments across three continents, was estimated variously at £200 million, £500 million and higher — the uncertainty itself a measure of how successfully he operated away from scrutiny. Sultan Qaboos reportedly sent him a cheque for £1 million on his birthday each year. Nobody seemed entirely sure how many years this had been going on.

By the late 1970s, Landon had returned to England.

He married Princess Katalina Esterházy de Galantha — Hungarian aristocracy, Habsburg loyalists, owners of vast Central European estates for five centuries — and established himself here at Faccombe, assembling a 4,000-acre estate of Hampshire downland near the Berkshire border.

His Boeing was a regular sight arriving at Farnborough, the nearest airport, as he continued to shuttle between England and Muscat. In London he travelled by personally owned black cab, the better to avoid attention. He installed one of Britain's earliest large private wind turbines on the estate, decades before environmentalism became fashionable. The Faccombe Estate became known for shooting, farming, conservation and an immaculate, intensely private atmosphere — stories still circulate of sophisticated security systems, guarded entrances and blacked-out Range Rovers sweeping the lanes like something from a le Carré novel rewritten by P.G. Wodehouse.

He died in Winchester in 2007.

His son, Arthur, inherited the estate and, in 2008, became the youngest person ever to appear in the Sunday Times Rich List. Arthur's friendships with Princes William and Harry occasionally brought Faccombe quietly into public view — Prince Harry's stag celebrations were reportedly held at The Jack Russell Inn in 2018, perhaps the most straightforwardly cheerful chapter for him.

Whatever the full truth behind the mythology — and much of it may never be known — Landon left a distinctive imprint on this hidden Hampshire valley. The estate is immaculate, the village is well cared for, and the pub at its centre is, by any measure, far better than a village of this size has any right to expect.

Draw your own conclusions about how that came to be.