HISTORY OF THE NEW FOREST
he New Forest in Hampshire and south-east Wiltshire is one of our most popular national parks, and it is easy to see why. People are drawn by its utterly distinctive landscape, dotted with free-ranging ponies and ancient trees, and its rolling heaths.
It has been welcoming a steady stream of admirers since Victorian times, when the railway was first built. The New Forest is more accessible than many of our parks, being close to the large population centres of Southampton, Bournemouth and Salisbury, and can be easily reached by train or bus as well as by car. Its villages are well-equipped to cater for the summer influx of visitors with teashops and inns aplenty, there’s an abundance of car parks next to popular picnic spots, a good range of campsites and a well-organised network of cycle trails and footpaths. The forest is a great place for families, too – somewhere that children can reconnect with life’s simpler pleasures, such as paddling in a stream or building a den in the woods.
TRUNNING WILD
One side of my family originated from here and, as a boy growing up in Hampshire, the forest was my favourite place to visit. I loved being able to roam free in an unfenced landscape and the forest’s extraordinary wildlife. When I left home as a teenager, I set out to see the world and my travels took me to a lot of places, but never to where I had come from. Now I’m older and more settled, my thoughts lead me back to the forest where I spent so much of my childhood.
I went there some 30 times over the course of a year, revisiting my childhood memories in the hope of learning what had changed and what had stayed the same, in the forest and perhaps also in myself. I’ve spent much of my life visiting some of the more far-flung
Human history in the area dates to Neolithic times, and there are still around 200 Bronze Age barrows to be found. Following the Norman conquest in the 11th century, the new rulers took power and did whatever they liked. And what they liked most of all was hunting. The New Forest was the first of many deer parks they established. Residents were prohibited from practicing agriculture, but their commoners’ rights were enshrined in the Charter of the Forest in 1217. The following centuries saw the
“STEP OFF-TRAIL, SIT BENEATH THE OAKS AND WAIT FOR THE BIRDS AND THE DEER TO COME TO YOU”
forest’s oaks become vital to the shipbuilding industry and the 20th century saw huge changes in the expulsion of the forest’s Gypsy population (a New Forest Gypsy family is pictured above) and the construction of wartime airfields and bombing ranges. In 2005, the New Forest was designated as a national park.