New Forest National Park

New Forest National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

The New Forest lies in the south of England, in the south-west of Hampshire, between Southampton, Bournemouth and Salisbury, and it is the most accessible national park in the country, an hour and a half from London by frequent direct trains, which stop in the middle of it at Brockenhurst, and by the M27 motorway. It is a landscape of open heath, ancient woodland and grassy lawns, across which ponies, cattle and donkeys wander at will, among villages of thatched cottages, and it is visited for gentle walking, cycling, riding and pub lunches, not for drama. There are no gates or fees, only charges for the forestry car parks. Lyndhurst, the little capital of the forest, has the New Forest heritage centre, the best introduction, and Brockenhurst, Burley, Beaulieu and the sailing town of Lymington, on the coast, are the other bases. More than 160 kilometres of waymarked gravel cycle tracks, almost flat and largely free of traffic, cross the forest, and bicycles, including electric ones and trailers for children, are hired at Brockenhurst station and in several villages;

an open-topped bus makes three circuits in summer and carries bicycles. For walkers there are paths everywhere, the favourites being the Tall Trees trail and the Blackwater arboretum on the Rhinefield ornamental drive, the deer viewing platform at Bolderwood, where wild fallow deer are fed in the afternoons from spring to autumn, the ancient woods round the Knightwood oak, the heaths about Beaulieu Road, and the coastal path along the Solent at Lepe and Keyhaven. The set-piece attractions are at Beaulieu, where a single ticket covers the national motor museum, the ruins of a Cistercian abbey and the palace house of the Montagu family, and at Buckler's Hard, a perfectly preserved shipbuilding hamlet of the eighteenth century on the Beaulieu river, with a maritime museum and river cruises. Exbury gardens and the Rufus stone complete the list.

Visiting New Forest National Park: what you will see

The New Forest is new only by the standards of English history. It was created about 1079 by William the Conqueror as a royal hunting ground, nova foresta, a forest in the legal, not the botanical, sense, that is, an area of heath, wood and farmland placed under a special and savagely enforced law for the protection of the king's deer; chroniclers accused him of destroying villages and churches to make it, and saw divine judgment in the deaths there of two of his sons, above all that of William Rufus, killed by an arrow while hunting on 2 August 1100, whether by accident or design has never been settled, at a spot marked by a stone. The crown's interest later shifted from venison to timber, and the forest's oaks built a large part of the wooden navy, Nelson's Agamemnon among them, launched at Buckler's Hard. Through all this the inhabitants retained, as they still do, ancient rights of common attached to their properties: to turn out ponies, cattle and donkeys to graze on the open forest, to fatten pigs on the acorns and beechmast in autumn, a right called pannage, to cut turf and to gather firewood. It is this grazing, carried on without a break for nine centuries, that has made and that maintains the landscape, keeping the heaths and lawns open and the woods free of undergrowth.

Some five thousand ponies live on the forest, all of them owned by commoners though they look wild, hardy, sure-footed animals of a recognised breed, which are rounded up each autumn in the drifts to be checked, marked and sold; their welfare and the rights of common are overseen by the court of verderers, which has sat at Lyndhurst since the Middle Ages and still meets in public, and by five agisters in the field. The national park was designated in 2005, the smallest in England at about 570 square kilometres, and nearly half of it is unenclosed crown land managed by the state forestry body. It contains the largest area of lowland heath remaining in western Europe, a habitat that has almost vanished elsewhere, with wet valley mires of international importance, and what are called the ancient and ornamental woodlands, pasture woods of beech, oak and holly, with pollarded trees six and seven hundred years old, richer in lichens, fungi and wood-boring insects than any others in lowland Britain. All six native British reptiles live here, including the rare smooth snake and sand lizard, with the Dartford warbler, the nightjar, the woodlark, the honey buzzard, the goshawk, the hawfinch, five species of deer, and plants such as the wild gladiolus found nowhere else in the country. During the Second World War twelve airfields were laid out on the heaths, and the armies that landed in Normandy embarked from its shores.

New Forest National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The forest can be visited all year. Spring, from April to June, brings foals, bluebells in the woods, fresh beech leaves and the gardens of Exbury in flower; August is the month of the heather, when the heaths turn purple; and autumn, from late September to November, is perhaps the most beautiful season, with the beech woods golden, fungi everywhere, the red and fallow deer rutting, and pigs rooting for acorns under the trees during the pannage season. July and August are busy, particularly at Lyndhurst, where the traffic queues, at Burley and at the coast, and accommodation should be booked ahead;

winter is quiet, mild and muddy. The animals have right of way on the unfenced roads, where the speed limit is forty miles an hour, and many are killed each year, mostly at dusk; they must not be fed or touched, since ponies bite and kick, and fines are imposed. Keep dogs under control, especially in the bird nesting season from March to July. Ticks are present in bracken and heather. Allow two to three days. Salisbury, Winchester and the ferries to the Isle of Wight from Lymington are all within half an hour.