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Once all of England looked like this; even a thousand years after its enclosure, the New Forest still feels medieval: an ancient domain which ought not to exist at all, and which, ironically, owes its preservation to an invader. It has no physical boundaries to mark its beginning or its end, and yet it encompasses a third of Hampshire. It is barely an hour and a half’s drive from London, but it is a liminal region, for all its apparent accessibility. In the Dark Ages, this was one of the last parts of the country to remain pagan; in the Second World War, witches gathered here to ward off an invasion force invested with its own occult beliefs. This place of purity has ever been suffused with the alien: from the Romans and the Vikings, to whom I owe the kink in my little finger, to the gypsies who first came here from Europe five hundred years ago, and who until recently sent their children to school wearing rabbit-skins under their clothes.
Even its name is deceptive – ‘forest’ was the word for a hunting ground, rather than woods – and modern visitors wonder where all the trees are. For mile after mile, the eye sees nothing but great stretches of heathland flattened by the sky: the spaces where the woods once were. Calluna vulgaris and Ulex europaeus – the pink-belled heather and the coconut-scented gorse – colonise these gravelly expanses with relentless efficiency. These are tough, hard-bitten plants used to the hooves of the ponies that congregate idly on the verges, their thick hides, shaggy manes and round bellies stolid and unmoving as their big black eyes reflect the cars which occasionally cull one of their number, each sweet stupid victim awaiting its turn.
Yet for all its contradictions, or perhaps because of them, the forest is a compendium of myth. It reaches back to an age before the cruel Norman laws which would amputate the fingers of poachers and mutilate their dogs’ feet, to dark woods peopled by Herne the Hunter, a man in stag’s guise, his antlers ‘spreading like mantling in the breeze’; and to the wise wild men, strange figures part way between animal, vegetable and human who had their Victorian counterpart in Brusher Mills, the snake-catcher who allowed his reptiles to slither through his beard.
A place where the pagan worship of trees conflated with the verdant cross of Christian immortality, ever subject to the immemorial cycle of life, death and resurrection, this new-old forest stands for all threatened wildernesses. It promises a sylvan idyll, the greenwood of all our imaginings, invested with certainty and superstition, hope and fear; a place of sanctuary, mystery and magical transformation, here in the heart of England, our lost and ancient Eden.
Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood
Where the right road was wholly lost and gone
Dante, The Divine Comedy
I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness,
‘Make straight the way of the Lord’
John 1:23
When I was a boy, we’d often drive into the forest. With my father at the wheel of our Wolseley and my mother at his side, the world seemed as secure and bound and polished as the big old car itself. I would lie back and look up through the rear window at the trees passing hypnotically overhead. They seemed both remote and near as I looked out for a particular row of pines which reminded me of the day I lost my toy koala bear – his rabbit fur and shiny snout the source of deep solace – on scrubby cliffs above a Dorset beach where, for all the hours of searching, he was not to be found.
Now, forty years later, the westbound train crawls through Southampton’s outer suburbs, as if the city’s gravity were reluctant to let it go. This is the rear view, where England turns its back on itself, as if ashamed of its own history. Here the houses look into their few square yards, denying their communality with leylandii and larch-lap; here where subtopian dreams meet suburban reality. Then, gradually, the tarmac gives way to gravel, concrete to grass, allotments to wide heaths where pole-straight silver birch stake out new territory, screening the sky with their filigree bronze branches, standing guard over rutted ground riven with stony rills like frozen waterfalls. This land is open and limitless, laid bare in a way we have forgotten; we know contours only through gear changes, as our towns and cities gather together, seeking safety in numbers for fear of nature and its unpredictable ways.
At Brockenhurst, I haul my bike onto the empty platform. The forest station still seems rural, with its two-stop line to Lymington and a waiting room decorated with photographs by Julia Margaret Cameron, given in memory of her son and intended to beautify this connexion between London and her home on the Isle of Wight. But now visitors are greeted by letters spelt out in ballast on the side of the track Welcome to Brock. Beyond the village, with its butcher selling venison and its stockbroker-belt guarded by expensive cars, the B-road races the railway to the coast, while on the horizon the Island hovers where clouds should be, a lowering landmass separated by the unseen sea.
The wind is against me as I cycle over the open heath, and I’m grateful for the descent into the village of Sway, its outskirts marked by a tall stone cross. Remembrance wreaths still lie on the war memorial, their scarlet paper poppies faded by the sun and spotted by rain; propped up on the railing is a discarded hubcap. Dipping into the valley beyond, the lane darkens with tall trees. I turn off into Barrows Lane, where a hand-painted sign announces Arnewood Turkeys, but this is no ordinary farm building. Concrete where the rest of the forest buildings are brick, its classical proportions, domed roof and pillars resemble some strange escape from the Italian countryside. Beside it, in an overgrown field, is a stubby campanile, a plastic bag flapping from its unglazed window. Seemingly unfinished – as if its creator intended to return to his handiwork – this fairytale towerlet labours under an ivy burden. But it is dwarfed by the structure in whose shadow it lies, an eminence impossible to ignore, yet so unexpected that you could pass by without raising your eyes and miss it entirely. Reaching up out of the forest is an immense grey column, rising two hundred feet into the sky. Its very shape seems to change with the clouds – a sun-lit gnomon from one angle, a mad church steeple from another.
It is so bizarre that it seems completely detached from its surroundings. Over the road, a hard-hatted engineer perches at the top of a telegraph pole, barely aware of the tower that looms over him, just as I cannot remember it from my childhood visits to the forest. Perhaps it is a mirage, appearing only fitfully. Or perhaps it is part of some vast underground complex, some covert scientific experiment. The stillness of this unnamed country lane invites conspiracy: there is no sign of life, no one to acknowledge or explain this extraordinary structure. Omnipresent but forgotten, it refutes the curiosity of the modern world, as though gagged by its own