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Published: November 1st 2007
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The Photographer's Shadow
On the heath stretching east from Lyndhurst - one of the prettiest spots of the New Forest. I arrived in Bournemouth bright and early, full of enthusiasm and determined to find a place for the night straight away, so I could leave my bags and go exploring. Unfortunately my expectations were a
leetle too high. The bored guy at the Tourist Information Centre in the bus station told me straight away that the Backpacker’s limited opening hours were the reason I had not been able to reach them on the phone the night before. Conveniently, they are open for a whole hour every day. Between five and six in the evening. Gee.
It was nine thirty in the morning. There was no way I was going to wait til five o’clock to find out if Bournemouth Backpackers had a bed - I wanted to have a good day wandering the New Forest, not worrying about where I was going to sleep and if my stuff was safe. So ignoring the TIC guy’s smug pronouncements that the Labour Party was in town and I wouldn’t find anything else, I walked up to the first nice-looking bed and breakfast I saw, and secured a room with no trouble. I settled in quickly and took off downtown to locate my
Bournemouth
Raked within an inch of its life, this was the prettiest picture I managed to take of the bare, windy beach. bus.
Missing one by the skin of my teeth meant I had half an hour to kill, so I walked though the pretty-pretty park space (I wasn’t a fan, but I could see that it was going down well with the multitudes of pastel-clad retired couples) down to the pier. The famous white sand beach was gleaming in the sunlight, but I have to say I found it a most uninviting place.
The beach is wide and windswept, and the sand looked like every square inch had been raked, which made it appear as dirty as it probably was. (Maybe that’s why they rake it.) In the height of summer it’s probably nice enough - although then of course you’d have to contend with the hordes of sun-burning Britons on deckchairs...
Bournemouth’s pier is covered in amusements like every other seaside pier, but without the class Brighton somehow manages - it’s merely cheap and tawdry. Even worse, there was a bag search operating and the area was swarming with police. I found out later that it had been used as a base for some of the Labour Party Conference service facilities, but at the time it was
Forest pools
The wooded parts of the New Forest are gushing with all the trickling brooks, mirrored lakes and flowing rivers a poet could desire. very off-putting. I wasn’t sorry not to have more time in the town.
I grabbed a top deck front seat on the double decker to Lymington, and sat contentedly in a wash of sunlight the whole way down the coast. We wound through Bournemouth’s satellite, Christchurch, and then along a string of progressively smaller villages high up on the cliffs above the sea. The view was lovely, especially with such gorgeous sunshine, but my photographic attempts only caught the glare reflected in the grimy windows.
Lymington is a tiny town perched high above its port, and is a celebrated beauty spot in its own right - but the New Forest was the order of the day, and Lymington merely the gateway, so I stopped only long enough to get some advice. I wanted to know the best destination in the Forest to see the ponies… and I got a very strange look from the young assistant before he bent over my map and bus timetables to give me his advice.
It was only when I hopped off the bumpy little bus in Brockenhurst half an hour later that I understood why he’d thought my question a bit
odd. Any visiting alien life form would certainly note the majority and ask to be taken to the leader of the ponies. Cattle grids at each end of the main street stop livestock getting in the shops, but otherwise Brockenhurst is their oyster - ponies everywhere! They pay little attention to passing people or traffic, and the locals treat them as beloved but annoying pets.
I followed a peaceful stream halfway around the town, admiring the fields and the wandering ponies and cattle, and trying to avoid the frequent knots of school kids doing some sort of art project. The New Forest is not fenced - it is held as common land, and the residents have all sorts of grazing and gathering rights, some dating back centuries and couched in obscure archaic language, yet still vigorously upheld by the Verderer's Court in Lyndhust, the main town of the New Forest.
Lyndhurst is much prettier than Brockenhurst, I think, although I had been told otherwise. Brockenhurst serves as the rail link of the Forest, and the village appears small, functional, and boring, whereas Lyndhurst is full of life. It's the most populous town, the court is here, and so
Tracks in the sand
Beasts of land, air and petrol leave their marks on the white sands of Bournemouth. is the main shopping area and the largest concentration of pubs and restaurants. Built on a hillside, the church and the municpal buildings are at the top, and the shops and pubs run down to the bottom, where the town peters out into the woods and moorlands beyond.
When I arrived it was long past lunch time, so naturally I went straight to the pub. The Fox and Hounds furnished me with an enormous and very tasty pub lunch of Cumberland sausages, sweet potato mash and peas, and I was so hungry I nearly finished it. Happily full, I went wandering the high street. One of my first stops was for my New Forest souvenier - a pair of gloves to warm my icy hands!
The parish church of St Michael’s is at the top of the hill, visible all around the town. It's a large, handsome red brick building, but it is the graveyard which is famous. A profusion of flowers covers the top of the most visited grave - one Mrs Reginald Hargreaves, who spent her married life in Lyndhust, and was purportedly much involved in local affairs. Mrs Hargreaves was born Alice Liddell, the daughter
Traffic in Brockenhurst
The ponies didn't give two hoots about the cars... when necessary, guess who gave way? of the Dean of Chirst Church College in Oxford. Bored one day as a child, she challenged a family friend, the young mathematics lecturer, Charles Dodgson, to tell her a story. She liked it so much she begged him to write it down, and
Alice in Wonderland was published two years later under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.
From the west end of town there is a wonderful view of the moors. The early evening light turned the heather golden, and on my way back to the town one of the ponies was so contented with his lot he allowed me to photograph his face, instead of ignoring me and eating as though his life depended on it. A clear evening, it was getting very cold and I was back in town in plenty of time for the bus, and very eager to hop on it! We cicuited part of the moor I had not seen, before before heading back towards Bournemouth, where I began to pack my things for a weekend in Newquay.
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Amy
non-member comment
Ponies!
Yay for the forest ponies! Did you get a picture of Alice's grave? I miss pub food...