BEAULIEU, BETWIXT THE WOOD AND THE SEA
Beyond Ladycross, anciently the boundary of the Abbey right of Sanctuary, opens another wide heath stretching every way—high, wind-swept, looking southward to Tennyson’s monolith on Beacon Down, eastward to Portsdown Hill. At Hatchett Gate, where a pond with a bit of white paling and some wind-bent pines breaks the monotony, a truly modern note is struck, for close by Mr. Drexel has set up his hangars and his School of Aviation, and on the rare occasions when the wind drops a monoplane may be seen hovering over the waste. Thence the road goes steeply down to the valley through which the Exe finds its way to the sea, and over a jumble of red roofs gleams a broad water, and beyond, on green lawns, rises the old grey Palace House, once the residence of the abbot. This was the fair spot, the Bellus Locus,
which John, though he loved not monks, chose for the Cistercian Abbey which, in a fit of compunction, he founded in 1204.
THE MILL POND, BEAULIEU
It was no life of idle contemplation that the brethren led. On the slopes above they had their vineyards, terraced towards the sun, with a raised causeway to wheel the grapes down to the wine-press, where the crumbling grey walls are still standing. Masons, too, must have been busy building and beautifying the great church, now level with the ground, though the foundations have been carefully traced and marked out. As cultivated land increased, granges were built, of which several remain: St. Leonard’s, with its huge barn and portions of its chapel yet standing, Herford, and Sowley Grange over against Sowley pond, once called Colgrim Mere, where there were ironworks. The map in Gilpin’s Picturesque Scenery shows an opening to the sea at Pitt’s Deep where the iron used to be shipped. The rival north soon carried off the trade, but Sowley firebacks may still be picked up in the neighbourhood.
The name Bergery, near Park, denotes a sheepcote, and Bouvery, spelt in the maps Beaufré, is, of course, the ox farm; there is also a Swinesley not far off, so the industries of the monks were many and various. But this busy, peaceful life was all too prosperous, rousing the cupidity of the king in the troubled times
of the Reformation. To justify the spoliation, exaggerated tales of the scandal of sanctuary rights were told, and commissioners came down with their minds made up beforehand. Doubtless it was a matter liable to abuse, but in the rude days of blood feud and swift vengeance it was no bad thing that the Church should be able to stretch a sheltering arm over the criminal. But into all these questions this is no place to enter. Suffice it that the last abbot appointed was a creature of Cromwell’s who, with thirty of his monks, was induced to sign a deed of surrender in consideration of a pension. The riches of the stately abbey went into the king’s coffers, the domain was conferred on Thomas Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, grandfather to that Henry Wriothesley who was the friend of Shakespeare. Through marriage it passed to the Dukedom of Montague, then to that of Buccleuch, in which family it still remains in the person of Lord Montague of Beaulieu.
The whole story may be found in Sir James Fowler’s recently published History of Beaulieu Abbey, with remarkable illustrations by Mr. F. Fissi, reconstructing from old records the abbey as it must have looked in its living days. The residence has, of course, known many alterations: the old vaulted room of the great gatehouse is now the dining-room of the Palace House, and the fine inner hall also
belongs to the original building. On the floor above, what was once the chapel has been converted into a stately drawing-room, panelled probably in Tudor times when it was secularized. Much, of course, has been added at different dates. Not much more than a century ago the last Duke of Montague erected a castellated wall with a moat, fearing the descent of French privateers by the river. The old refectory makes a very lovely little church, the pulpit being the raised desk for the lector, approached by an arcade in the wall. Close by the church, in the shade of a row of lime trees fragrant and murmurous with bees, stands the Domus or Guest House—for hospitality was one of the prime obligations of the monks—now happily restored by Lord Montague and made a place of hospitality once more, the veritable centre of the social life of the village.
About two miles down the river, on the other shore, lies one of the quaintest, most interesting spots in the whole neighbourhood. Coming on it from above, it is almost startling in its oddity. It is hardly a village, just a wide street, grass-grown and asleep, leading down abruptly to queer and unaccountable remains of docks and stays, for this—this little desolate hamlet—was once, and not so long ago either, one of the important dockyards of this great seafaring nation of ours. From this cradle issued the
Agamemnon, which carried Nelson at the battle of the Baltic, the Euryalus and the Swiftsure, which both took part in the fight at Trafalgar. The last Duke of Montague proposed to build a town here and make it a port for the sugar trade with the West Indies, as he owned the island of St. Lucia; but by the Peace of 1748 this was ceded, and his scheme lapsed. The possibilities of the place, and especially the nearness to the Forest for the supply of oak timber, were seized upon by Henry Adams, who set up his shipbuilding yards, and turned out several fine frigates. In 1794 Gilpin writes: “The great number of workmen whom this business brought together, have given birth by degrees to a prosperous village”. The end was tragic: Henry Adams was succeeded by his two sons, who carried on the business on the same lines; they were commissioned to build four ships by the Admiralty, and being unable to deliver them at the time agreed, were ruined by fines and litigation. Had this not happened, the business could not long have held its own; as wood was superseded by iron, the advantage of the Forest would have been lost; moreover, there is little doubt that the Exe is gradually silting up as the Lymington river has done.
BUCKLER’S HARD
The good days of Buckler’s Hard are over, and no regular ferry plies now between the once busy
dockyard and the farther shore; but the chances are the traveller will find an old boatman to put him across and land him under a dense wood, where a group of tall pines rises above a thick growth of oak and beech, and, following the road to the beach, he will come upon a scene typical of the strip of coast that borders the Forest, “betwixt the woods and the sea”.
Here is no glory of headland, no fierceness of breaker on the reef, but a wide water, infinitely blue, lapping on the grassy margin where the trees lean over, or lying far out in long, shining lines between the flats—golden, purple, olive brown—where the white gulls stalk and feed—ungainly birds on land—and beyond again, sapphire and amethyst, rise the softly rounded chalk hills of the Island, ending in the milk-white Needles. Far to the left may possibly be discerned a dreadnought or two, just below where the escarpment on Portsdown Hill shows like a white smudge above the harbour.
The stones of the little beach are not worn smooth with the tide, but are loose and rough, held together by sea-holly and yellow horned-poppy and the coarse tawny grass that disputes the land with the seaweed. It is a place to dream in; not this time of the building of ships nor yet of the “White Company”, but of long-past days when the Greek merchants used to
come across Gaul from Massilia (Marseilles) and trade with Lepe for tin. A Roman road then crossed the Forest from the port to convey merchandise to the settlements of the Roman Provincials, and William the Norman and his Forest Laws were not yet looming on the horizon.
In Gilpin’s day Lepe was “one of the port towns of the Forest, and, as it lies opposite Cowes, the common place of embarkation to the island”. He also records the tradition that it was from this remote port that the Dauphin took ship, on the death of John, after his fruitless attempt on the English Crown. And here, also, the unfortunate Charles was brought from Titchfield House on his way to Carisbrooke under the ill-starred guidance of Ashburnham. “Here he was seated in an open boat, and from these shores he bade a last farewell to all his hopes in England.”
Well may old Gilpin have averred that this southeast corner holds some of the loveliest bits of forest scenery, for within sight of the sea lies an enchanted wood, hard to find, impossible of access by motor, a place from which the cheap tripper will turn aside with the remark that there is nothing to see. It is true; yet the initiated may not impossibly find that the way through the wood is the way through the ivory gates. For him it holds a charm of restful silence, a
beauty of gleam and gloom, of blue shadow sprinkled with the fairy whiteness of the enchanter’s nightshade, of spaces of sunlight lying on the golden bracken, broad ways that must surely lead to the magician’s castle, and narrow winding paths that can but have their goal in Elfland.
It is what in these parts we call a holm, a grove of oaks with a thick underwood of hollies grown into weird shapes with frequent cutting. Here and there is an aged thorn which has attained almost the size and girth of a forest tree, and in places Scotch firs lift their stately heads. In their tops the sea-sound murmurs, and about them is the hot fragrance the sun draws out of their resinous branches mingling with the tanny odour of the bracken. An alley through hollies meeting overhead is like a tunnel; it issues on a broad sunny level where four roads meet, each beckoning so enticingly, one is fain to sit down awhile to weigh their claims. One source of the peculiar loveliness of such a holm is that all the ways are green. The grass will flourish under oaks and hollies while it perishes under the beech, and where the fir trees stand, their roots are shrouded in bracken which in summer takes up the tale of greenness, and when October frosts come lights up the ways with gold.
It is a long coppice, and so strangely shaped that
it is possible to make endless wanderings, and even to achieve the losing of one’s way, till dusk falls and the owls are hooting to each other from upland to covert, and along the moonlit border of the wood the nightjar is churring with tumbling flight.
One thing only mars the harmony: over against a tumbledown thatched cottage a pert, shallow erection in reddest of red brick and shiniest of slate hideously obtrudes itself on the greenness. Yet the story of it is not without pathos. An old labourer, who had never earned more than fifteen shillings a week, saved and saved till he could buy the old cottage and build the new one in the pride of his heart.