BURLEY MOOR
An interesting feature is the annual pony fair. There is one also at Swan Green, by Lyndhurst, and another at Brockenhurst, but that at Burley is the best, affording more space. The one at Brockenhurst, where the ponies are penned into a dirty yard by the station, has little charm for a looker on. At Burley one can see their paces tried over the open lawn, and great and smart is the concourse of horsemen, carriages, and motors. A still more interesting
business, but one not so easily seen, is the gathering them in from the Forest. Men on clever, well-trained ponies go out, armed with long stock whips, driving the startled creatures together, often into bogs to secure them.
Westward and southward towards Holmsley the moor is broken into heights and hollows, giving a magnificently varied outline, and diversified with wooded enclosures on the lower slopes. Here the fallow deer may often be met with, though the red hardly come so far south. Wilverley Post, at the crossroad, is a favourite spot for deerhound meets as well as foxhound, and the coverts to the north-west are seldom drawn in vain. Eastward slopes of broken ground, lightly wooded and dotted with clumps of thorn, tangled in honeysuckle and bramble, lead down to the chain of woods towards Lyndhurst. One of the most beautiful of these is Burley Old Wood. This still keeps many of its fine old oaks, besides magnificent beeches, and there is more variety than in most of the enclosures, for besides these there are ash, chestnut, and hornbeam, mingled with the dainty elegance of the silver birch; some yews, too, as large and old as any at Sloden. So fine is the grouping, that even on a grey day of drizzling rain, with none of the dappling sun and shadow that lend such a charm to woodland ways, it lost nothing of its magic.
To pass through the gate into Burley New Enclosure is like a sudden step from a mediæval city into a modern industrial suburb. The trees are in straight, ruled lines, too thick-set to admit of fair growth, and gladly we extricate ourselves and, returning by the raised causeway that crosses the stretch of bog at Longslade Bottom by Markway Bridge, we regain the highroad at Wilverley Post.
Opposite Wilverley stands the blasted tree known as the Naked Man, holding up its bleached, appealing arms to heaven, now welcomed as a signpost rather than shunned as a bogy. A little beyond is Setthorns, with a small, lonely keeper’s lodge at the edge of it. This wood must have been very lovely before the intrusion of the railway that now cuts across it, and indeed still has great charm. In Mr. Gilpin’s day it had been recently cleared of its fine oaks, and bitter are his lamentations over their disappearance and that of the grove of yews that flourished below. But he wrote more than a century ago, and since then the wood has been replanted—happily before the new fashion of straight rows of young trees, like a cabbage garden, had come in. One of the most entrancing of bridle-paths enters the road just below the railway bridge and, passing down by a steep descent, emerges on the Avon Water—not to be confounded with the
river Avon—which here broadens into a pool. The stream passes under Meadend Bridge, which forms the Forest boundary at this point, and flows on to join the sea at Keyhaven.
Sway, once the most picturesque of villages, perched on its high common, is now nearly overwhelmed with red brick and vulgarity, probably consequent on its possession of a railway station. It is only partly within the Forest bounds. From here a road running by a ridge of down leads to Shirley Holms, one of those primeval patches of oak and holly, clear of undergrowth, that are specially beloved of the gipsies for close overhead shelter and clear space beneath for tent and fire. This road comes out on the main highway at Battramsley Cross; but if the objective be Brockenhurst, a better way is to turn at Marlpit Oak and go down by Latchmoor (or -mere), the pool of corpses. This ill-omened name belongs to some great battle of long ago, but a dark tradition of last century still hangs about the spot.