The New Forest - Its History and its Scenery

THE NEW FOREST

ITS HISTORY AND ITS SCENERY

BY

JOHN RICHARD

DE CAPEL WISE

With 63 illustrations. Drawn by Walter Crane.

Engraved by W. J. Linton.

And Two Maps.

Copyright © 2013 Read Books Ltd.

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Contents

PREFACE.

CHAPTER I.

CHAPTER II.

CHAPTER III.

CHAPTER IV.

CHAPTER V.

CHAPTER VI.

CHAPTER VII.

CHAPTER VIII.

CHAPTER IX.

CHAPTER X.

CHAPTER XI.

CHAPTER XII.

CHAPTER XIII.

CHAPTER XIV.

CHAPTER XV.

CHAPTER XVI.

CHAPTER XVII.

CHAPTER XVIII.

CHAPTER XIX.

CHAPTER XX.

CHAPTER XXI.

CHAPTER XXII.

APPENDIX I.

APPENDIX II.

APPENDIX III.

APPENDIX IV.

PREFACE.

Under the title of the New Forest I have thought it best to include the whole district lying between the Southampton Water and the Avon, which, in the beginning of Edward I.’s reign, formed its boundaries. To have restricted myself to its present limits would have deprived the reader of all the scenery along the coast, and that contrast which a Forest requires to bring out all its beauties.

The maps are drawn from those of the Ordnance Survey, reduced to the scale of half an inch to the mile, with the additions of the names of the woods taken from the Government Map of the Forest, and my own notes.

The illustrations have been made upon the principle that they shall represent the scene as it looked at the time it was taken. Nothing has since been added, nothing left out. The views appear as they were on the day they were drawn. Two exceptions occur. The ugly modern windows of Calshot Castle, and the clock-face on the tower of the Priory Church of Christchurch, have been omitted.

Further, the views have been chosen rather to show the less-known beauties of the Forest than the more-known scenes. For this reason the avenue between Brockenhurst and Lyndhurst—the village of Minestead, nestling half amongst the Forest oaks and half in its own orchards—the view from Stoney Cross, stretching over wood and vale to the Wiltshire downs, have been omitted. Every one who comes to the Forest must see these, and every one with the least love for Nature must feel their beauty.

In their places are given the quiet scenes in the heart of the great woods, where few people have the leisure, and some not the strength to go—quiet brooks flowing down deep valleys, and woodland paths trod only by the cattle and the Forest workmen.

For the same reason, sunrise, and not sunset, has been chosen for the frontispiece.

To the kind help of friends I am indebted for much special aid and information—to the deputy surveyor, L. H. Cumberbatch, Esq., for permission to open various barrows and banks, for the use of the Government maps, as also for the Forest statistics—to the Rev. H. M. Wilkinson, and T. B. Rake, Esq., for great assistance in the botany and ornithology of the district; as also to Mr. Baker, of Brockenhurst, for the list of the Forest Lepidoptera.

London, November, 1862.

"Game of hondes he loued y nou, and of wÿlde best,

And hÿs forest and hÿs wodes, and mest þe nÿwe forest."

Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle

(concerning William the Conqueror)

Ed: Hearne, vol. ii. p. 375.

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

No person, I suppose, would now give any attention to, much less approve of, Lord Burleigh’s advice to his son—Not to pass the Alps. We have, on the contrary, in these days gone into an opposite extreme. We race off to explore the Rhine before we know the Thames. We have Alpine clubs, and Norway fishing, and Iceland exploring societies, but most of us are beyond measure ignorant of our own hills and valleys. Every inch of Mont Blanc has been traversed by Englishmen, but who dreams of exploring the Cotswolds; or how many can tell in what county are the Seven Springs, and their purple anemonies? We rush to and fro, looking at everything, and remembering nothing. We see places only that we may be seen there, or else be known to have seen them.

Yet to Englishmen, surely the scenes of their own land should possess a greater interest than any other. Go where we will throughout England, there is no spot which is not bound up with our history. Nameless barrows, ruined castles, battlefields now reaped by the sickle instead of the sword, all proclaim the changes our country has undergone. Each invasion which we have suffered, each revolution through which we have passed, are written down for us in unmistakeable characters. The phases of our Religion, the rise or fall of our Art, are alike told us by the grey mouldings and arches of the humblest parish Church as by our Abbeys and Cathedrals. The faces, too, and gait, and dialect, and accent, of our peasantry declare to us our common ancestry from Kelt, and Old-English, and Norseman. A whole history lies hid in the name of some obscure village.

I am not, for one moment, decrying travelling elsewhere. All I say is, that those who do not know their own country, can know nothing rightly of any other. To understand the scenery of our neighbours, we must first see something of the beauties of our own; so that when we are abroad, we may be able to make some comparisons,—to carry with us, when we look upon the valleys of the Seine and the Rhine, some impression of our own landscapes and our own rivers—some recollection of our own cathedrals, when we stand by those of Milan and Rouen.

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 traces of Norman castles as at Malwood, to their ruins as at Christchurch, to Henry VIII. 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.

And here, if this book should induce any readers to visit the Forest, let me earnestly advise them to do so, as far as possible, on foot. I see but this main difference between rich and poor—that the poor work to get money, the rich spend money to get work. And I know no better way for Englishmen to use their superfluous energies than in learning their own country by walking over its best scenes.

I will only ask any one to make the experiment between walking and driving over the same ground; and see how much he will learn by the one, how much lose by the other method. In the one case, he simply hurries or stops at the discretion of some ignorant driver, who regards him of less importance than his horses; in the other, he can pause to sketch many a scene before invisible, can at his leisure search each heath or quarry for flowers or fossils, can turn aside across the field-paths to any village church, or wander through any wood which may invite him to its solitude, and, above all, know the pleasure of being tired, and the sweetness of rest in the noontide shade.

Footnotes

1 Political Pieces and Songs relating to English History. Edited by Thomas Wright. Vol. ii., p. 199.

CHAPTER II.

ITS SCENERY.

As I said in the last chapter, one of the main objects of this book is to dwell upon the beauty of the Forest scenery. I chose the New Forest as a subject, because, although in some points it may not be more beautiful than many other parts of England—and I am glad to think so,—it gives, more than any other place, a far greater range of subject, in sea, and moor, and valley; because too, the traveller can here go where he pleases, without any of those lets and hindrances which take away so much pleasure; and, lastly, because here can best be seen Nature’s crown of glory—her woods.

And, first, for a few words of general bearing upon this point. I do not think we ever estimate the woods highly enough, ever know their real worth, until we find some favourite retreat levelled to the ground, and then feel the void and irreparable blankness which is left. Consider, too, the use which Nature makes of her woods, either softening the horrors of the precipice, or adorning spaces which else would be utterly without interest, or adding beauty to beauty. Consider, further, how she beguiles us when we are in them, leading us forward, each little rise appearing a hill, because we cannot see its full extent; how, too, the paths close behind us, shutting us out with their silent doorways from all noise and turmoil, whilst the soft green light fills every dim recess, and deepens each pillared aisle, the floor paved with the golden mosaic of the sunlight.

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.[1]

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.[2] 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 a more special view, and looking at the district itself, we must remember that it is situated on the Upper and Middle Eocene, and presents all 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.[3]

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, wave 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.[4] 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—beoccorl—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.

We do not see the forest of our forefathers. Go back eight centuries, and look at the sights which the Normans must have beheld,—dense underwoods of hollies on which the red deer browsed; masses of beech and chestnut, the haunts of the wolf and the boar; plains over which flocks of bustards half-ran, half-flew; swamps where the crane in the sedge laid its buff and crimson-streaked eggs; whilst above grey-headed kites swam in circles; and round the coast the sea-eagle slowly flapped its heavy bulk. Great oaks, shorn flat by the Channel winds, fringed the high Hordle cliffs, towering above the sea; and opposite, as to this day, rose the white chalk rocks of the Needles, and the Isle of Wight, not bare as it now is but covered, too, with a dense forest. And the sun would set as it now does, but upon all this further beauty, making a broad path of glory across the bay, till at last it sank down over the Priory Church of Christchurch, which Flambard was then building.

Gone, too, for ever all the scenes which they must have had of the Avon, glimpses of it caught among the trees as they galloped through the broad lawns, or under the sides of Godshill, and Castle Hill crested with yews and oaks.[5]

These may all be gone, but plenty of beauty is still left. The Avon still flows on with its floating gardens of flowers—lilies and arrowhead, and the loosestrife waving its crimson plumes among the green reeds. The Forest streams, too, still flow on the same, losing themselves in the woods, eddying round and round in the deep, dark, prison-pools of their own making, and then escaping over shallows and ledges of rolled pebbles, left dry in the summer, and on which the sunlight rests, and the shadows of the beeches play, but in the winter chafed by the torrent.

Across its broad expanse of moors the sun still sets the same in summer time—into some deep bank of clouds in the west, and as it plunges down, flashes of light run along their edges, and each thin band of vapour becomes a bar of fire, and the far-away Purbeck hills gleam with purple and amethyst.

The same sea, too, still heaves and tosses beneath the Hordle and Barton Cliffs, with the same purple patches, shadows of clouds, sailing over it, as its waves, along the shore, unroll their long scrolls of foam.

These great natural facts have not changed. Kelt and Roman have gone, but these are the same.

Nor must I forget the extraordinary lovely atmospheric effects, noticed also by Gilpin,[6] as seen under certain conditions, from the Barton Cliffs on the Isle of Wight and the Needles. Far out at sea will rise a low white fog-bank gradually stealing to the land, enveloping some stray ship in its folds, and then by degrees encircling the Island, whilst the chalk cliffs melt into clouds. On it still steals with its thick mist, quenching the Needles Light which has been lit, till the whole island is capped with fog, and neither sea nor sky are seen,—nothing but a dense haze blotting everything. Then suddenly the wind lifts the great cloud westward, and its black curtains drop away, revealing a sky of the deepest blue, barred with lines of light: and the whole bay suddenly shines out clear and glittering, the Island cliffs flashing with opal and emerald, and the ship once more glides out safe from the darkness.

A few words, too, must be said about the two principal tree-forms which now make the Forest. The oaks here do not grow so high or so large as in many other parts of England, but they are far finer in their outlines, hanging in the distance as if rather suspended in the air than growing from the earth, but nearer, as especially at Bramble Hill, twisting their long arms, and interlacing each other into a thick roof. Now and then they take to straggling ways, running out, as with the famous Knyghtwood Oak, into mere awkward forks. The most striking are not, perhaps, so much those in their prime, as the old ruined trees at Boldrewood, their bark furrowed with age, their timber quite decayed, now only braced together by the clamps of ivy to which they once gave support and strength.[7]

The beeches are even finer, and more characteristic, though here and there a tree sometimes resembles the oaks, as if with long living amongst them, it had learnt to grow like them. The finest beech-wood is that of Mark Ash. There you may see true beech-forms, the boles spangled with silver scales of lichen, and the roots—more fangs than roots—grasping the earth, feathered with the soft green down of moss.

But not in individual trees lies the beauty of the Forest, but in the masses of wood. There, in the long aisles, settles that depth of shade which no pencil can give, and that colouring which no canvas can retain, as the sunlight pierces through the green web of leaves, flinging, as it sets, a crown of gold round each tree-trunk.

Let no one, however, think they know anything of the Forest by simply keeping to the high road and the beaten tracks. They must go into it, across the fern and the heather, and, if necessary, over the swamps, into such old woods as Barrow’s Moor, Mark Ash, Bushey Bratley, and Oakley, wandering at their own will among the trees. The best advice which I can give to see the Forest is to follow the course of one of its streams, to make it your friend and companion, and go whereever it goes. It will be sure to take you through the greenest valleys, and past the thickest woods, and under the largest trees. No step along with it is ever lost, for if never goes out of its way but in search of some fresh beauty.

We see plenty of pictures in our Exhibitions from Burnham Beeches or Epping Forest, but in the New Forest the artist will find not only woodland, but sea, and moorland, and river views. There are, as I have said, when taken in details, more beautiful spots in England, but none so characteristic. Finer trees, wilder moors, higher hills, more swiftly-flowing brooks, may be found, but nowhere that quietness so typical of English scenery, yet mixed with wildness, nowhere so much combined in one.

I say, too, this, strange as it may doubtless appear, that Government, whenever it fells any timber, should spare some of the finest trees for the sake of their beauty, and for the delight they will give to future generations. Cut down, and sawn into planks, they are worth but so many pounds. Standing, their value is inappreciable. We have Government Schools of Design, and Government Picture Galleries, but they are useless without Nature to assist the student. Government, by keeping here some few old trees, will do more to foster true Art than all the grants of Parliament. The old thorns of Bratley, the beeches of Mark Ash, and the yews of Sloden, will teach more than all the schools and galleries in the world. As we have laws to preserve our partridges and pheasants, surely we might have some to protect our trees and our landscapes.

Lastly, from its very nature, the New Forest is ever beautiful, at every season of the year, even in the depth of winter. The colouring of summer is not more rich. Then the great masses of holly glisten with their brightest green; the purple light gathers round the bare oaks, and the yews stand out in their shrouds of black. Then the first budding branch of furze sparkles with gold, and the distant hill-side glows with the red layers of beech-leaves. And if a snow-storm passes up from the sea, then every bough is suddenly covered with a silver filigree of whitest moss.

This joyful tyranny of beauty is ever present, at all times and hours, changeful in form, but the same in essence. Year after year, day after day, it appears.

I know, however, it is impossible to make people see this beauty, which, after all, exists only in each beholder’s mind. No two people see the same thing, and no person ever sees it twice. But, I believe, we may all gain some idea of the glory which each season brings—some glimpses of the heaven of beauty which ever surrounds us—if we will seek for them patiently and reverently. They cannot with some be learnt at once, but, in degrees, are attainable by all; but they are attainable only upon this one condition,—that we go to Nature with a docile, loving spirit, without which nothing can be learnt. If we go with any other feeling, we had much better stay in a town amidst the congenial smoke, than profane Nature with the pride of ignorance and the insolence of condescension.

Footnotes

1. It is worth noticing how, according to their natures, our English poets have dwelt upon the meaning of the woods, from Spenser, with his allegories, to the ballad-singer, who saw them only as a preserve for deer. Shakspeare touches upon them with both that joyful gladness, peculiar to him, and the deep melancholiness, which they also inspire. Shelley and Keats, though in very different ways, both revel in the woods. To Wordsworth they are—

"like a dream

Or map of the whole world: thoughts, link by link,

Enter through ears and eyesight, with such gleam

Of all things that at last in fear I shrink."

Of course, under the names of woods, and any lessons from them, I