Outside Lyndhurst the forest begins to look less wild. Victorian brick cottages peep about among the trees. Lodge gates stand guard to winding drives of laurel and azalea, at the end of which—how deep, how far, who knows?—are the country houses of the formerly rich. Five or six times a year perhaps, the verderers come to the Swainmote which is held in the King’s House at Lyndhurst. Strange rights of turbary, pannage and smoke money go with certain old freehold cottages. The Forest laws are administered from Lyndhurst and it is as well to know some of them. For instance, an entomologist must apply to the King’s House at Lyndhurst for a permit to catch moths and butterflies; and he is not allowed to sugar the trees. No licence is required, on the other hand, to be stung by flies among the oaks of the New Forest. These flies, called stouts, seem to carry small poisoned swords and draw blood. Hornets abound. When Tennyson, his wife and children and William Allingham, the poet, were swimming through bracken on July 15th, 1866, on their way to the great beeches of Mark Ash, Tennyson paused midway and said solemnly: “I believe this place is quite full of vipers.” After going a little further he stopped again and said: “I am told that a viper bite may make a woman silly for life or deprive a man of his virility.”
Despite the main roads and the modern houses and the coaches of Lyndhurst, wild life comes right into it. Wild New Forest ponies wait about outside the National Provincial Bank, or stand at the cross roads, in the middle of the traffic.
Lyndhurst is like Aldershot without the Army. Most of the houses are two storeys and the only old and remarkable one is the gabled King’s House near the church. But before motor cars came into existence and with them the “caffs,” “kiosks,” guest-houses, before the petrol pumps, wires, poles and signs that follow the motor car—before all these things, Lyndhurst, lost in the Forest and its nearest railway station three miles away, must have been a paradise to stay in. Now it is a suburb for Southampton business people, with cricket grounds around it and a golf course.
Fifty years ago, artists, poets and musicians booked lodgings in the district. The huge Crown Hotel, rebuilt in 1897 in a half-timbered style, opposite the church, is a relic of those times. In fact Lyndhurst was the home of Victorian romance—wild nature after the smoke of towns, fir trees with a faintly Rhineland look, oak woods which took one back to the Forest of Arden, cultivated people instead of the vulgar throng. Ah! What a paradise it must have been to those rare Victorian souls! They expressed their gratitude in the huge church they built of red and yellow brick.Lyndhurst parish church was designed by William White and is in the most fanciful, fantastic Gothic style that ever I have seen, and I have seen a great deal. The spire itself is of brick, a remarkable feat. Inside, the brick columns have pipes of Purbeck round them and their capitals were carved by Mr Seale with leaves of New Forest trees. Unexpected dormers and gables jut out from the huge roof. The tracery of the windows is as strange as tropic plants. Some of the stained glass windows are by Morris and Burne-Jones and Rossetti. The prevailing colours inside are red and yellow. But Victorian stained glass and Victorian-coloured brick does not go with frescoes. Lord Leighton came to stay with Hamilton Aidé the song-writer and he painted a fresco over the altar of the church free of charge. It shows our Lord in white in the middle with the foolish virgins on one side and the wise ones on the other.
Lyndhurst church is capital, full of originality and thought and care. It expresses the courage and conviction of the Victorians. It is their lasting monument, towering on its mound above the gables of the Victorian houses and the oaks and beeches and fir trees of the New Forest. Weymouth
Safe and wide and sheltered Weymouth Bay! Of course it is called the Naples of Dorset. But any seaside place whose bay is in the shape of a crescent is called the Naples of wherever it happens to be. The test is, is Naples called the Weymouth of Italy? No. When wet south-westerly gales such as Naples never saw are thundering on Chesil bank to the west of the town, when there is a smack and suck and roar of waves upon those miles of squeaking pebbles, so loud in its rolling of millions upon millions of sea-smoothed stones that the noise travels miles inland, then Weymouth lies snug and sheltered. That eerie Chesil Bank and the shelfed and lumpy length of Portland protect the place from the prevailing storms. The distant chalk and grassy downs of Dorset, studded with earthworks and tumuli, keep off the winds from the north. Though plumes of spray try to mount the cliff top, along all that white and shadowy stretch of splendour to the east of Weymouth—Durdle Door, Lulworth, and the Kimmeridge ledges to St. Alban’s Head—Weymouth has no cliffs at all, unless you call its modest Georgian terraces and hotels cliffs. And spray does not often blow in at their windows.
Weymouth is on the mouth of the River Wey. It has water almost all round it—the brackish semi-tidal stretch of what once was called “the Backwater” behind the seaside
