The New Forest: Its History and Its Scenery

by John R. Wise

The New Forest is, perhaps, as good an example as could be wished of what has been said of English scenery, and its connection with our history. It remains after some eight hundred years still the New Forest. True, its boundaries are smaller, but the main features are the same as on the day when first afforested by the Conqueror. The names of its woods and streams and plains are the same. It is almost the last, too, of the old forests with which England was formerly so densely clothed. Charnwood is now without its trees: Wychwood is enclosed: the great Forest of Arden—Shakspeare’s Arden—is no more, and Sherwood is only known by the fame of Robin Hood. But the New Forest still stands full of old associations with, and memories of, the past. To the historian it tells of the Forest Laws, and the death of one of the worst, and the weakness of the most foolish, of English kings. To the ecclesiologist it can show, close to it, the Priory Church of Christchurch, with all its glories of Norman architecture, built by the Red King’s evil counsellor, Flambard; and just outside, too, its boundaries, the Conventual Church of Romsey, with its lovely Romanesque triforium, in whose nunnery Edith, beloved by the English, their “good Maud,” “beatissima regina,” as the Chroniclers love to call her, was educated.

At its feet lies Southampton, with its Late Norman arcaded town-wall, and gates, and God’s House, with memories of Sir Bevis and his wife Josyan the Brighte, and his horse Arundel—the port for the Roman triremes, and afterwards for the galleys of Venice and Bayonne—where our own Henry V. built

“the grete dromons,

The Trinité, the Grace-Dieu.”[1]

Within it, once in the very heart, stand the Abbot’s house and the cloister walls of Beaulieu, the one abbey, with the exception of Hales-Owen, in Shropshire, founded by John. It can point, too, to the Roman camp at Buckland Rings, to the ruins of the Norman castle at Christchurch, to Henry VIII.’s forts at Hurst and Calshot, built with the stones of the ruined monastery of Beaulieu; can show, too, bosomed amongst its trees, quiet village churches, most of them Norman and Early English, old manor-houses, as at Ellingham, famous in story, grey roadside crosses, sites of Roman potteries, and Keltic and West-Saxon battlefields and barrows scattered over its plains.

For the ornithologist its woods, and rivers, and seaboard attract more birds than most counties. For the geologist the Middle-Eocene beds are always open in the Hordle and Barton Cliffs inlaid with shell and bone. For the botanist and entomologist, its marshes, moors, and woodlands, possess equal treasures.

But in its wild scenery lies its greatest charm. From every hill-top gleam the blue waters of the English Channel, broken in the foreground by the long line of the Isle of Wight downs and the white chalk walls of the Needles. Nowhere, in extent at least, spread such stretches of heath and moor, golden in the spring with the blaze of furze, and in the autumn purple with heather, and bronzed with the fading fern. Nowhere in England rise such oak-woods, their boughs rimed with the frostwork of lichens, and dark beech-groves with their floor of red brown leaves, on which the branches weave their own warp and woof of light and shade.

Especially to its scenery I would call attention. This, above all, I wish to impress on the reader, seeing that beauty is one of the chief ends and aims of nature: and that the ground beneath our feet is decked with flowers, and the sky above our heads is painted, with a thousand colours, to cheer man as he goes to his work in the morning, and to fill his heart with thankfulness as he returns at evening.

Now, neither are scarcely ever seen. The flowers cannot grow in our stony streets: the glory of the morning and evening is blotted out by the fog of smoke which broods over our cities.

As the population grows, our commons and waste lands disappear. Our large towns have swollen into provinces. Fashion sways the rich. Necessity compels the poor to live in them. As our wealth increases, our love for nature contracts. One, therefore, of the chief objects of this book is to show how much quiet beauty and how much interest lie beside our doors—to, point out to the reader who may be jaded by the toils of Fashion or Labour where in England there are still some thirty miles of moorland and woodland left uncultivated, over which he can wander as he pleases.