BRAMSHAW, THE HILL COUNTRY
The wildest and loneliest, if not the most beautiful part of the Forest is to be found in the north-west, where a hilly tract lies between the road from Cadnam to Picked Post and that from Nomansland to Fordingbridge, and stretches westward from Bramshaw
to the rampart of high down which parts the Forest from the Avon valley. Here there are no crossroads to break it up; only bridle-paths or rough cart tracks, often impassable in winter by reason of bogs, connect the lonely Forest lodges with each other.
And what variety is here! From dense woods, hushed in noonday stillness, the wayfarer emerges on some unexpected crest, looking clear away over the Wiltshire Downs. By some sudden slope from a long, bleak, drear ridge he comes upon a still, dark pool with swans sailing on it. A little lonely hamlet has sprung up at the edge of the pond, and a modern gunpowder factory, put here to be well out of the way of the public—as indeed it is.
Transversely run two valleys with their streams, Latchmore Brook to make its way between the downs under Gorley Hill, and Docken Water, widening as it flows through the marshy bottom, till it joins the Avon at Moyles Court. Coming down the broken upland through Broomy by winding ways and chalky ledges, at dusk one may see a little troop of deer stooping their branchy heads to drink at the brook by Holly Hatch, here called Broomy Water. Here one may well fancy the colt-pixy the old tales tell of, light-stepping with waving mane and tail, “in the likeness of a filly foal”, luring the horses into
the bog that spreads from the stream up to the slopes of Ibsley Common.
From Brook, lying in a wooded hollow on the Forest border, the road goes steeply up to Bramshaw, an unspoilt village, not grouped about its church as an orderly village should be, but squandered all along a mile or more of road between that and the post office. The little sanctuary stands, as all the Forest churches do, raised upon a mound, and is approached by a flight of steps so long and steep as to make the tired wayfarer think of the ascent to some shrine in a Catholic country, and wonder how much indulgence is due to him for his climb. The quaint building has lost much of the charm that makes Minstead so gracious. It has been to some extent brought up to date, and further penance is imposed on the worshipper by new open sittings, hideous to the eye, cruel to the back. Once, before a readjustment of boundaries, it had the fascinating peculiarity of its nave being in Wiltshire and its chancel in Hampshire.
The church passed, the road leads on through the loveliest of beechwoods on Bramble Hill. He would be a strange traveller who would not forsake the dusty highway and plunge into the cool tangled glades till all sense of direction is lost. For the special and peculiar beauty of this, unlike most Forest enclosures,
is that there are no straight rides cutting it transversely, but the winding alleys seem of Nature’s own planting, and these make it easy to stray, one fair group of noble trees after another beckoning along the wide green ways into the heart of the wood. One may fancy one is following the direction of the road, but it is far out of sight in a few minutes. Never mind! Every path must lead somewhither, and, sticking faithfully to one, we presently emerge upon a high, wide plateau, whence the eye may travel to Salisbury spire on the one hand and to the downs above Winchester on the other, though its low-lying cathedral is lost in their folds. From here one can see the Beacon on Dean Hill and the Old Telegraph on Longwood Warren, whence Bramshaw Telegraph close by would take its signal and hand it on to Burley Beacon.
BY BROOMY WATER
On the edge of the level stands a little inn, and nearer the wood cocoanut shies and Aunt Sallies are set up for the delectation of the Salisbury and Southampton trippers. But we are soon away from such disturbing elements. A desperate clamber up the stoniest of hills leads to the ridge that divides the two counties. It is curious to observe that here the moorland seems to be laid on quite different lines to those in the south part of the Forest, partaking more of the nature of the Wiltshire Downs. This
road must be desolate and drear enough in winter, but it commands even finer views than the vaunted ones at Picked Post. Following it over Deadman’s Hill, the sweeps of Ashley Walk slope steeply down to Amberwood and Island Thorns.
Southward of these lies Sloden, which possesses special points of interest. Along its fence, beds of nettles interrupt the bracken, and where these occur a little grubbing may unearth some shards of Roman pottery. This is said by experts to denote a regular factory of earthenware, since the bits are too numerous and too invariably broken to be the ordinary debris of a household, but must be the waste product of the potter’s wheel. Once, also, there existed here a grove of noble yews, and of these some yet remain. One remarkable ring of eleven together hint at what they were in their glory, and just outside the enclosure a striking semicircle of half a dozen, standing round some oaks, are better seen in the open. Density and solitude are the chief characteristics of Sloden Wood. Here in its depth the ponies can find a refuge from the storm, a shadow from the heat, more impervious than many a stable. Here, too, the hind may bring forth her young and discover the thick bushes. For this is the special haunt of the fallow deer, and, resting quiet in the shade, one may chance to see a little company of the graceful, stately creatures
pass slowly, with dainty footsteps, across a glade at no great distance—provided, that is, one has taken up a position to leeward, for if the breeze bore a taint of human breath, the shy, wild things would be gone like a flash. Less stately and less fierce than the red deer, they are hardly less beautiful in their dun coats, palely spotted, and the little fawns are exquisite. Legally the stag no longer exists, but some may yet be found in these wilder coverts, either they have lingered on or have wandered down from Cranbourne Chace, and they afford a finer day’s sport.
People talk rather loosely of the “wild” creatures of the Forest, including in the phrase the ponies and the pigs; but in truth nothing larger than a fox or a badger is really wild in the sense that lions and tigers in the jungle are—that is, masterless. The deer are the property of the Crown, and as to the rough, shaggy, hammer-headed ponies, though they roam at large day in, day out, winter and summer, and find their own subsistence, their notched tails mark them as belonging to some forester with grazing rights. At one time stallions were turned loose in the Forest to improve the breed, but these were Crown property, and now neither they nor bulls are allowed at large, and boar have ceased to exist. The pigs certainly all belong to the cottagers, and are now no longer seen in big flocks at pannage, that
is from 22 September till 25 November. There is a charming account in one of Mr. Gilpin’s volumes of the swineherd who used to take charge of all the pigs of a large district during this season, giving them warm food and shelter at night, so that they would collect from their wide wanderings at the sound of his pipe. The breed of pigs which was indigenous to the Forest has now died out—probably the make did not lend itself to good hams. Gilpin thus describes them: “Besides these (the domestic pigs) there are others in the more desolate parts of the Forest, bred wild and left to themselves, descendants of the wild boar imported by Charles I from Germany (probably at the suggestion of his nephew, the Elector Palatine). They had broad shoulders, high crest, bristly mane, the hinder parts light, and they were fiercer than the common breed.” Writing some fifty years later, Wise alludes to their shaggy coats, brindled and rust colour, and I myself can remember them as he describes them.
By Fritham and Sloden are some of the most noteworthy of those mysterious barrows, locally called butts, which have exercised the curiosity of antiquaries. Others are found across the valley, on the heights by Bushy Bratley, and there are several on Setley Plain. Wise in his History gives a very full and interesting account of the opening of some of these
tumuli both by himself and by Warner, who wrote on The South-western Parts of Hampshire. Invariably there was found burnt earth and charcoal, together with calcined human remains, in some cases contained in urns of “rude forms and large size”, which led him to the conclusion that they are the funeral pyres of the ancient Britons, probably long anterior to the Roman Invasion. The hints they give of life in the Forest in far-past days are indeed scanty, but their presence, standing age-long on remote uplands, suggests strange visions of the long succession of races that have dwelt here.