The Forest Read Free Page B

made her give a little gasp of surprise as, coming out over the top of the ridge, the wood abruptly ended and then, suddenly, the horizon and the sky burst open all around her and she entered another land entirely.
    It was not what she had expected. Before her, as far as the eye could see, lay a vast tract of brown heath. The sun, still low on the horizon, was starting with a yellowish stare to disperse the trails of morning mist that stretched like strands of cobweb across the landscape. The bracken and heather-clad ridge on to which they had emerged swept down long slopes on each side into broad, shallow bottoms: a bog on the left; on the right, a gravelly stream with grass verges. All around, the heather was dotted with bushes and brakes of gorse in yellow flower. On another ridge, a mile away, a clump of holly trees stood out against the skyline. And, past that, the next ridge was covered by oak woodland, like the fringe behind her.
    There was something else about the landscape too. As she glanced down at the peaty topsoil by her horse’s hoofs, noticed the gravel stones there, which were an almost luminous white, and then looked up again and sniffed the air, she had a curious sense that, even though she could not see it, she was somewhere near the sea.
    Were there human habitations in this great wild waste? Were there hamlets, isolated farmsteads or cottages? There must be, she supposed; but there were none in sight. All was empty, quiet, primitive.
    So this was King William the Conqueror’s New Forest.
    Forest: a French term. It did not mean woodland, althoughhuge woods lay within its borders, but rather an area set apart – a reservation – for the king’s hunting. Its deer, in particular, were protected by savage forest laws. Kill one of the king’s deer and you lost your hand, even your life. And since the Norman conqueror had only recently taken the region for his own, the New Forest –
Nova Foresta
, in the Latin of official documents – the place was now called.
    Not that anything in the medieval world was supposed to be new. Ancient precedent was sought for every innovation. Certainly the Saxon kings had gone hunting in the area since time out of mind. So according to the Norman conqueror the place had already been under a stern forest law two generations earlier, in the good old days of King Canute, and he even produced a charter to prove it.
    The area he took for his New Forest was a huge wedge: from west to east it stretched from the Avon valley almost twenty miles across to a great inlet that came in from the sea. From north to south it descended gently for over twenty miles in a series of gravelly shelves, from the chalk ridges east of Sarum all the way down to a tract of wild marshland on the coast of the English Channel. It was a mixed terrain, a great patchwork of heath and woodland, grassy lawn and bog, over which little bands of men had wandered, settled, made clearances and departed for so many thousands of years that it was no longer possible to decipher with certainty whether any patch of the landscape was fashioned by the design of God or the cruder hand of man. Most of the land was peaty and acidic, and therefore poor; but here and there were tracts of richer soil, which could be cultivated. The greatest oak woods lay in the southern basin, often by boggy ground, and had probably not been disturbed for over five thousand years.
    And then there was the other feature of the New Forest that Adela had correctly sensed: the presence of the sea. Often the warm south-westerly breezes carried a faint hint of salt air even to the northern parts of the Forest. But thesea itself was nearly always hidden until one came out of the oak woods on to the coastal marshes. One visible sign there was, however. For opposite the eastern part of the Forest’s shore and divided from it by a three-mile channel known as the Solent water, rose the friendly hump of the chalky Isle of Wight. And from numerous vantage