The New Forest: Its History and Its Scenery

by John R. Wise

For all these things is it that the woods have been, since the beginning of the world, the haunt of the flowers, the home of the birds, and the temple of man. The haunt of the flowers, I say, for in the early spring, before the grass is yet green in the meadows, here they all flock—white wood-anemones, sweet primroses, sweeter violets, and hyacinths encircling each stem with their blue wreaths. The home of the birds; for when the leaves at last have come, each tree is filled with song, and the underwood with the first faint chirping of the nestlings learning their earliest notes. As a temple for man, have they not been so since the world began? Taught by their tender beauty, and subdued by their solemn gloom, the imaginative Greek well consecrated each grove and wood to some Divinity. The early Christians fled to “the armour of the house of the Forest,” to escape to peace and quietness. Here the old Gothic builders first learnt how to rear their vaulted arches, and to wreathe their pillars with stone arabesques of leaves and flowers, in faint imitation of a beauty they might feel, but never reach.[2]

Consider, too, the loveliness of all tree-forms, from the birch and weeping-willow, which never know the slightest formality, even when in winter barest of leaves, to the oak with its sinewy boughs, strained and tortured as they are in this very Forest, as nowhere else in England, by the Channel winds.[3] Consider, too, Nature’s own love and tenderness for her trees,—how, when they have grown old and are going to decay, she clothes them with fresh beauty, hides their deformities with a soft green veil of moss and the grey dyes of lichens, and, not even content with this, makes them the support for still greater loveliness—drapes them with masses of ivy, and hangs upon them the tresses of the woodbine, loading them to the end of their days with sweetness and beauty.

All this, and far more than this, you may see in the commonest woods round Lyndhurst, in Sloden, in Mark Ash, or Bratley.

Then, too, there is that perpetual change which is ever going on, every shower and gleam of sunshine tinting the trees with colour from the tender tones of April and May, through the deep green of June, to the russet-red of autumn. Each season ever joins in this sweet conspiracy to oppress the woods with loveliness.

Taking, however, a more special view, and looking at the district itself, we must remember that it is situated on the Middle-Eocene, and presents some of the best features of the Tertiary formation. Its hills may not be high, but they nowhere sink into tameness, whilst round Fordingbridge, and Goreley, and Godshill, they resemble, in degree, with their treeless, rounded forms, shaggy with heath and the rough sedge of the fern, parts of the half-mountainous scenery near the Fifeshire Lomonds.[4]

On the sea-coast near Milton, rise high gravel-capped cliffs, with a basis of Barton clays, cleft by deep ravines, locally known as “bunnies.” Inland, valleys open out, dipping between low hills, whilst masses of beech and oak darken the plains. Here and there, marking the swamps, gleam white patches of cotton-grass, whilst round them, on the uplands, spread long, unbroken stretches of purple heather; and wide spaces of fern, an English Brabant, studded with hollies and yews, some of them as old as the Conquest. Here and there, too, as at Fritham, small farmsteads show their scanty crops of corn, or, as at Alum Green and Queen’s North, green lawns pierce and separate the woods, pastured by herds of cattle, with forest pools white with buckbean, and the little milkwort waving its blue heath on the banks.

These are the main characteristics of the New Forest, and, in some points at least, were the same in the days of the Red King. Nature, when left to herself, even in the course of centuries, changes little. The wild boars, and the wolves, and the red deer, are gone. But much else is the same. The sites and the names of the Forest manors and villages, with slight alterations, remain unchanged. The same barrows still uplift their rounded forms on the plains; the same banks, the same entrenchments, near which, in turn, lived Kelt, and Roman and Old-English, still run across the hills and valleys. The same churches rear their towers, and the mills still stand by the same streams.

The peasants, too, still value the woods, as they did in the Conqueror’s time, for the crop of mast and acorns,—still peel off the Forest turf, and cure their bacon by its smoke.[5] The charcoal-burner still builds the same round ovens as in the days of William the Red. Old-English words, to be heard nowhere else, are daily spoken. The last of the old Forest law-courts is held every forty days at Lyndhurst. The bee-master—beoceorl—still tends his hives, and brews the Old-English mead, and lives by the labours of his bees. The honey-buzzard still makes her nest in the beeches round Lyndhurst, and the hen-harrier on the moors near Bratley.

I suppose this is what strikes most persons when they first come into the New Forest,—a sense that amidst all the change which is going forward, here is one place which is little altered. This is what gives it its greatest charm,—the beauty of wildness and desolateness, broken by glimpses of cultivated fields, and the smoke of unseen homesteads among the woods.

Yet the feeling is not quite true. Like every other place in England, it has suffered some change, and moved with the times. Instead of the twang of the archer’s bow, the sunset gun at Portsmouth sounds every evening. The South-Western Railway runs through the heart of it; and in place of the curfew’s knell, the steam whistle shrieks through its woods.