In these days we are surrounded by noise and excitement. Everywhere is haste and its accompanying confusion. It matters not what we do, the fever of competition ever rages. We travel as though we were flying from ourselves. We write the history of things before they are accomplished, and the lives of men before they are dead. Surely there is some profit to be found in coming to a quiet village like this, if it will only give us some glimpses of a life which stands out in such strange contrast to our own.
Canopied Niche in St. Leonard’s Chapel.
CHAPTER VII.
THE SOUTH-WESTERN PART—BROCKENHURST, BOLDRE, SWAY, HINCHELSEA, AND BURLEY.
View in Frame Wood, Brockenhurst.
At present we have seen nothing of the actual Forest. It is only as we go northward that we begin to enter its woods. Instead of the old Forest track, a road now runs from Beaulieu to Brockenhurst, along which we will go. So, leaving the village, and passing a few straggling half-timbered cottages, we reach Stickland’s Hill, where, down in the valley, we can see the Exe winding round the old Abbot’s House set amongst its green elms. Farther on we come to Hatchet Gate, and the Forest then spreads before us, with Hatchet Pond on our left, and Little Wood and the Moon Hill Woods on our right; whilst, here and there on the common, rise scattered barrows.
And now, instead of keeping to the road, let the reader make right across the plain, by one of the Forest tracks, to the woods at Iron’s Hill. The stories, with which most books on the Forest abound, of persons being swamped in morasses, are much exaggerated. Mind only this simple rule—wherever you see the white cotton-grass growing, and the bog-moss particularly fine and green, to avoid that place.
And now, when you are fairly out on the moor, you will feel the fresh salt breeze blowing up from the Solent, and see the long treeless line of the Island hills in strange contrast with the masses of wood in front; whilst the moor itself, if it be August, waves with purple and crimson, except where, here and there, rise great beds of fern-green islands, in the red sea of heath.
Most of the finest timber at Iron’s Hill and Palmer’s Water has been lately cut. Keeping on, however, we shall again come out upon the road which leads down to the stream, close to a mill. Passing over the footbridge, we skirt Brockenhurst Manor, where, at Watcombe, once lived Howard the philanthropist, and so at last reach the village.