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 purposes to which Nature turns 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.

Consider not only their beauty, but their use, breaking, for the plants, the fall of winter showers, and storing for them, against summer’s drought, their wealth of springs and streams—giving to the cattle shade from the heat, and shelter from the storm. This for the plants and beasts of the field,—but for man, binding together the sandy shore, carrying off the fog and miasma from the marsh, raising the strongest bulwark against the sea, and truest shield against the pestilence.

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.

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, where at Watchingwell stretched another forest of the King’s. 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.[6]

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 dark 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,[7] 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 is 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.[8]

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 wherever 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 it 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.