TADS #55:Ashurst to Brockenhurst (or Old Yet Ever New).

There are two ways in which TADS are very much like The Fall. One, and with due reference to Mark E Smith and a falsely humble apology, if it's me and your granny on bongos, it's the TADS. Two? In the words of John Peel, TADS, like The Fall, are always different but they're always the same.

 

We'd last visited the New Forest back in September 2017 and we'd been keen to go back. I'd scheduled the walk for May as it seemed likely we'd be able to enjoy clement weather and fully appreciate the beauty of the place. That was not exactly how it panned out.

The unpromising weather forecasts I'd been reading all week weren't lying. Yesterday was something of a wash out. I blame King Charles for angering the 'gods' by having a coronation. An event I was more than happy to neither watch on television or in person. I thought I'd be spending it in a sunny beer garden instead but that wasn't the case.

Despite the poor weather, however, I had a brilliant time and judging by what the others said, and how much laughter I heard throughout the day, so did everyone else involved. I've got a feeling this walk will be one of the ones we look back most fondly on as time passes by.

I'd woke early, 5am, got the train to Clapham Junction, met Pam, and then another train to Southampton where we met with Neil and Bee. By the time we arrived in a very rainy Ashurst we'd had a message from Teresa and her, Adam, Shep, and Laura were already in The Happy Cheese. It's a pub but nobody, in our group at least, was drinking booze. Coffees and lemonade all round.

 

 

 

The Happy Cheese, there used to be a rival pub across the road called The Angry Cheese but that's gone now, is a place some of us had visited many many years ago but that wouldn't have been for breakfast. Which is a pity because the veggie breakfast was one of the best I'd ever had. Beans on toast, fried eggs, huge mushrooms, one hash brown, and some fried tomato (which I donated to an eager Shep). The sausages looked pretty anaemic so I smothered them in ketchup. I didn't need to. They tasted delicious. Much better than they looked.

The coronation was on the television in the background. An old man, Charles Windsor, was sitting on an expensive chair while the Archibishop of Canterbury screwed a silly hat on to his and his wife's heads. Nobody was paying much attention but elsewhere in the New Forest we'd be confronted with Union Jack flags, bunting, cardboard cut outs of King Chuck, balloons, and a man playing God Save The King on a box piano.

Each to their own but I'd rather the mega rich paedophile adjacent royal family fucked off and we got rid of all this monarchy bollocks. The most important Royal news of the week for me was that Reading FC had been relegated earlier in the week.

 

 

We left the pub and headed back towards Ashurst station. It was still raining. You can probably tell by the photos. Ashurst, Happy Cheese and Angry Cheese aside, doesn't have many claims to fame but it is the place where, in 2009 and at the age of 93, the last survivor of the 1912 Titanic disaster, Millvina Dean, died. She'd been living in the village and had staunchly refused to watch James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster film about the disaster after having nightmares when she watched 1958's A Night To Remember

The New Forest, motto - Old Yet Ever New - stolen for my walk's title, features in the Domesday Book and it began life as a royal forest under the proclamation of William the Conqueror. Also known as William the Bastard. He was a bastard too, using the forest to hunt deer. Two of his sons, Prince Richard and the then king William II (William Rufus), died in the forest. William II, believed to be Britain's first bisexual monarch, had his lung pierced by an arrow while out hunting. Game know game.

The forest's 71,474 acres span parts of Hampshire and Wiltshire and the four largest settlements (Brockenhurst, Lyndhurst, Ashurst, and Sway) all have populations below four thousand. Smaller villages included Bealieu and Minstead. It seems there's probably more animals than people out in the forest although we didn't see a lot of either.

Mammals included ponies (we saw them), cattle, donkeys, pigs, deer (we saw them but from a distance so we couldn't be certain if they were fallow, red, or roe), squirrels (grey ones, the reds died out here in the 1970s), European polecats, Eurasian otters, and American minks. 

 

There are reptiles and amphibians too. Adders, grass snakes, sand lizards, great crested newts, frogs, and toads. As for birds, the list is almost endless:- woodlarks, lapwings, warblers, nightjars, hobbies, cuckoos (we heard them), woodpeckers (them too), stonechats, snipes, pipits, kites, redstarts, shrikes, ouzels, harriers, and wheatears. There are even European honey buzzards.

But what there was yesterday, more than anything else, was water. We hit it pretty quickly. A supposed path by the side of the railway line was, in truth, a flooded field. A marsh. Some bits were easily passable but others less so. There was a lot of zigging and zagging for us zigzag wanderers (check out the maps at the end of this blog) and, at some points, it seemed advisable to take a run and jump to cross a large puddle or an improvised stream.

Pam was the first to fall. She jumped the puddle with ease but lost her footing on landing. I managed to hold on to her before she became completely caked in mud but she still end up with some lovely brown stains on her bag, coat, and top. Though she didn't look quite as ridiculous as I did in Epping Forest back in March or Shep did in Coulsdon's Happy Valley back in 2018.

Eventually we reached a path, which involved walking through even muddier areas and traversing a low lying thick set tree branch (most went over, a couple went under, Adam - ever the iconoclast - went round), and crossed a bridge over the railway line. There was brief respite from the mud and we even saw our first ponies, as large as horses I thought - some eating leaves from the tree like dinosaurs, of the day. 

When I say the respite was brief I mean it. About one kilometre of damp, but manageable, walking and soon we were in far trickier terrain. It looked amazing but it wasn't easy to navigate the puddles. I'm glad it happened at the start of the walk while people's spirits were still high. The walkers took different approaches, Neil and I trudging through in our boots while Shep, Laura, Adam took their shoes and socks off and got closer to nature.

Laura, at one point, was nearly waist deep in the water. It didn't seem to bother her at all. She was on top form. We had to cross the Beaulieu river (not a tributary, not a brook, not a stream, a bloody river) and that wasn't easy. Some us us jumped it, some crossed on improvised and not particularly sturdy looking bridges, some were carried across in their ponchos. Bee was last to cross and at one point it looked like she'd not make it. She did though. We were all very glad about that.

 

 

 

 

 

I was first over, and got to see some deer which soon ran off, and it quickly became apparent that we'd have to alter our route a little because the river was winding and wending all through the fields and we didn't fancy crossing it again without a bridge.

Of course, we had to. As we squelched our way through the marshes we soon heard the rumbling traffic from the A35 between Ashurst and Lyndhurst. We aimed for it but to get to it we had to cross the Beaulieu river again. A tree had fallen, or been placed, across the banks but the water was very deep and the tree looked a bit slippery.

Somehow we all made it across okay. I was last over this time and I was very nervous crossing so it was a relief to get over. The next stretch was a fairly dull, although we saw some nice wisteria, but easily walked path alongside the road into Lyndhurst. A place I'd not even planned for the walk to visit.

 

 

Everyone had earned a drink so, tempted by the fact it hosts a rum & reggae night, we tried The Mailman's Arms, opposite a large Ferrari garage - there's some money in the New Forest, but there were no tables free. We carried on up the High Street and ensconsed ourselves in The Fox and Hounds, a home from home for the Tadley contingent.

Some of the walkers sat barefooted, Laura put her trainers on the radiator in the toilet, and I nursed a pint and half of Peroni in amongst the bunting and balloons (even if the ER & GR postboxes are yet to be joined by a CR one). We discussed why there's no fucking beavers around when you need them and Pam mentioned that the day's walk, so far, had made the infamous Groombridge disaster of 2016, seem like a doddle.

Spirits remained high. We're a jolly bunch of walkers (or at least that's what I think I heard someone call us). Lyndhurst was once home to the infamous snake catcher Brusher Mills and to a young lady called Alice Liddell who Lewis Carroll used to read stories to and many believe is the inspiration for Alice In Wonderland. It is also, in folklore, the location of a famous dragon slaying. The Bisterne Dragon used to fly around local villages and steal, or be supplied with, milk.

Even better than that, no less of a man than ventriloquist Keith Harris was born in Lyndhurst. So I like to think of it as being the birthplace of Orville the Duck and Cuddles the Monkey. This, rather unfortunately, gave me an earworm of "I Wish I Could Fly", and also led to us betting each other to order drinks, or the curry later, in the voice of Orville. I possibly went too far when I imagined Orville working on saucy 0898 phone calls.

 

From the pub, and once Laura had bought a new pair of socks, we left Lyndhurst and headed south on the busy A35/Gosport Road. We didn't giggle once at a road called Shaggs Meadow (no sirree) and we didn't, though three of us were tempted, make a pub stop in Ye Old Crown & Stirrup. The pub I'd planned for us to stop in until our route was so rudely altered.

Despite the burnt out van in the car park, it looked a nice pub too, and it let Laura and Pam in to use the facililties, but if we'd stopped we'd have been making time very tight for ourselves. Instead, not long after the pub, we crossed a cattle and pony grid back into the forest proper. It had stopped raining but it was still wet. If not anywhere near as boggy as the earlier stretch. This was very much a walk of two halves.

 

This section was quite delightful. Mossy trees, copper hued pools of water, frolicking deer, waterways with names like Highland Water, Fletchers Water, and, er, Spaniard's Hole, and people feeling pleased they'd soldiered on and not quit - which, briefly, had seemed an option earlier on. Not long after a campsite we crossed a bridge, an actual proper bridge rather than a fallen tree trunk, over the fast flowing Lymington River and then we cut a long and straight diagonal line into Brockenhurst itself.

The 'capital' of the New Forest, apparently. During World War I, Brockenhurst hosted the Lady Hardinge Hospital for Wounded Indian Soldiers and, in 1934, Cass Gilbert died in Brockenhurst. Most people won't know who he was, I certainly didn't, but he's the architect (born in Ohio, 1859) of the US Supreme Court Building in Washington DC and New York's Woolworth Building which was the world's tallest between 1913 and 1930.

 

Brockenhurst, like Lyndhurst, was festooned in coronation bunting but we were more taken by watching cars splashing through the surprisingly deep ford on the outskirts of the village. I was tempted by a game of pooh sticks but there were no other takers.

We could see the Indian restaurant, the Dynasty, I'd booked in advance but we had an hour to kill so passed through the town, some stopping to sit on a HAPPY TO CHAT Bench, to the infamous Snakecatcher pub (named, of course, for Brusher Mills) and had a quick aperitif in there. It was busy. Coronation revellers or just people out on a Bank Holiday weekend, who knows?

 

 

I can't remember what, specifically, we talked about in there but I know I laughed a lot. As I did in the curry house. Dynasty is the only Indian place in Brockenhurst so choosing it wasn't difficult. It was busy so it was a good job we booked. We soon tucked into sixteen poppadums and, for some of us, pints of Cobra and my garlic chilli paneer masala was both spicy and tasty.

Most of the others enjoyed theirs too though the navrattan korma got only a lukewarm review from Teresa. The two hours in the restaurant flew by and soon Pam, Neil,  Bee and myself were on the way back to the train station. Stopping for train booze of course. Neil and Bee got off at Basingstoke and Pam and I in Clapham Junction. An Overground train to Peckham Rye and a 363 bus took me home where I watched the news.

It was all about the coronation. It didn't look like I'd missed much at all. I was much happier getting soaked, walking through muddy fields, doing Orville the Duck impressions, eating curry, drinking beer, and laughing with my friends so I'd like to thank Pam, Neil, Bee, Teresa, Adam, Shep, and Laura for making that happen (and, in the case of several of them, providing some of the snaps used here).Let's do it all again next month but this time from Battle to Hastings. Always different, always the same.