THE NEW FOREST
By WALTER TAPLIN
ANTIQUARIANS must have their fun. They no doubt anticip- ated plenty of it when the Report of the New Forest Com- mittee appeared last week and it was made known in the Press that it had recommended that the Court of Verderers should be recon- stituted and should exercise through a Court of Swainmote judicial powers in cases of unlawful enclosure, purpresture and encroach- ment. But that was not all. The Verderers, to be re-christened under the reform a Council instead of a Court, were named as suitable to manage the Open Forest so far as concerns the control of the grazing and health of all animals on the Forest, limiting their numbers if necessary by means of the weapon of levancy and couchancy which lies ready to their hand. Consequently the Com- moners, who had sweated of old under the undoubted hardship that at all times vert, great and small, were preserved for covert, and who had been freed as recently as 1877 of the difficulties of the midsummer fence month and winter heyning, were now to be assured on the sympathetic supervision of the enjoyment of their commons of pasture of commonable animals, pasture for sheep, mast, turbary, estovers and marl.
To those who were primarily attracted by these words the Report itself must have come as a fearful blow. It certainly mentioned them all, with sympathy and with an occasional touch of straight- faced relish. But for the most part the Committee were concerned not with words but with the things words represented. Some of them— for example the menacing thing represented by the word " purpres- ture "—are perfectly real and with us today, and the Committee were quite alive to the fact that something must be done about them. So in the end the Report was a disappointment to antiquarians. Having disposed, in the second paragraph of its Historical Introduction, of the legend that the Forest came into being by the ruthless act of William the Conquerer and crowded most of the other picturesque historical detail into a few incidental passages, the Committee got down to the serious task set in their terms of reference—" To investigate the state and condition of the New Forest and, having due regard to existing rights and interests, to recommend such measures as they consider desirable and necessary for adjusting the Forest to modern requirements."
In the first place it was a serious task for the quite simple reason that the New Forest is a very large tract of land, containing within its perambulation 92,365 acres. The life of such an area must neces- sarily entail in the ordinary course of events a great body of busi- ness of legal and public interest ranging from such everyday nuisances as the imperfect control of rubbish dumps to the blighting of districts by gypsies, the stealing of land for a road by people living in rows of houses having direct access to the Forest, and on to such gigantic encroachments as the 8,708 acres still held by Service and other Departments at the end of 1946 and the threat to the very existence of the Forest constituted by urban and industrial develop- ment on its eastern and southern borders. The management of such an estate in circumstances of special difficulty and in the midst of an area where the rate of population growth between the wars was far higher than in the rest of England and Wales is indeed an undertaking of such size that it is almost miraculous that so much beauty and quiet should have been preserved by a conglomeration of bodies of which the Verderers, the Forestry Commission and the County Council were only the first three. The interests of these bodies often overlapped and sometimes clashed. In particular the Verderers on the one hand and the Forestry Commission and its predecessors on the other have always been more inclined to treat their differences as an excuse for fighting rather than as a subject for conciliation. Yet somehow the worst consequences have not followed. The traveller, coming out of Bolderwood Walk and up on to Stoney Cross Plain, who finds himself confronted with a fairly discreet but none the less incongruous string of large villas along the edge of the wood, is after all witnessing a kind of failure which is still the ex- ception. Or if he goes up from Ipley Manor to the ridge of Yew Tree Heath looking straight at a hutted camp, complete with raised water tank, he can keep the hope that such disasters of the war can soon be put right. But the struggle against narrow personal interests and the blind stupidity of Government Departments is getting keener.
It is not enough for the administration of the Forest to be put on a normal basis of efficiency. The normal standards are not high enough, and the New Forest is a very special area requiring very special protection. The Committee call it a miraculous survival of pre-Norman England. They agree that from the point of view of natural history it is unique in Western Europe. To anyone who knows it really well it is, for all its wildness and the inaccessibility of some of its secrets, a place whose peace and beauty seem to hang by a thread. The primitive huts of Furzy Lodge and the splaying medieval track below it, the quiet red cottages at Bank, the fantastic sport of Minstead Church—all these things lie very close to busy roads. And even the walker knowing the ways, and prepared for wet feet all day, who has avoided a stag tearing along the bed of Black Water or walked delicately round an adder in a bog near King's Hat, cannot be sure that bleakness and inconvenience will keep out the intruders in future. The malignant growth of places like Totton (which the Committee tersely and accurately describe as "a place with no justification") and the slightly less obvious tentacles of suburbanity reaching out from Ringwood seem to frustrate conscious control. But the menace of people who want an enormous expansion of the oil depot at Fawley, landing grounds for pleasure aircraft in the Forest, the retention of wartime huts as holiday camps, or a road house at Bratley Plain for those whose thirst gets the better of them during a sixty-mile-an-hour drive between the John Barley- corn and the White Hart—this is a thing which can be stopped by a few determined men, armed once and for all with sensible legal powers. They will be powers rather different from those required for the purposes of planning and the preservation of amenities in other parts of England. But they should not be denied for that reason. It all comes back to the point that the New Forest is unique.
The recommendations of the Committee are in fact a model of the kind of good sense which is required to keep the Forest safe. They recognise that the paramount force in the New Forest is the Crown and they treat with proper scepticism the contention of the commoners that the real enemy is within the gates in the person of the Forestry Commission. That is not to say that,the Commission has no faults. Complaints about it as a despoiler of beauty and an enemy of good husbandry are found in other areas besides the New Forest and they cannot all be wrong. But the faults are more likely to spring from the awkwardness. and impersonality of a Government Department than from any ill-will. The vexed question whether commercially effective pines are the enemies of a natural landscape cannot be settled out of hand. There are places in the New Forest where the pines are a disfigurement. There are others, such as the great Milkam Inclosure, marching along the top of the ridge, where to one observer at least they are a handsome feature. All the Com- mittee do is to put the Forestry Commission in its place and the commoners in theirs. In future they must preserve harmony between them—if the report is accepted. The provisions concerning further inclosures, the preservation of the Forest as a nature reserve, roads, camps and playing fields are all equally sensible and moderate. If the Committee could pardon such a far-fetched compliment one might say that their recommendations have something in them which harmonised quite naturally with the restrained colours and contours cf the Forest itself. They probably need no such compliments. But if those whose business it is to consider and give effect to their recommendations will give them credit for knowing what they are talking about and accept the fact that an exceptional case requires exceptional measures they will have done well by their heritage.
Previous page
