Ashurst

A railway pub at the Forest edge

Ashurst New Forest station sits in the middle of the village, and the pub next to it grew out of the railway. The New Forest is a Fuller's gastropub built on the site of the old Railway Hotel, put up to house huntsmen who came down by train. It became the New Forest Hotel, and now it does free dog treats, dog beds, a beer garden with an outdoor playground, big-screen sport and a darts board. Tripadvisor rates it the top pub in Ashurst, and reviewers keep returning to the size of the Sunday roasts. The kitchen leans on Hampshire produce — venison bolognaise, fish and chips, a tikka curry that arrives in large portions, cream teas. Walkers and day-trippers use the front of it as a meeting point.

Step out of the station and the open Forest starts more or less immediately: pony-grazed lawns, heath, oak-and-beech inclosures. The village sits on the eastern edge of the National Park, with Southampton's suburbs on one side and every kind of New Forest landscape on the other.

Pubs, plantations and saltpetre

There are two other pubs. The Happy Cheese, on Lyndhurst Road, began as a small hotel and restaurant owned by Michael Leonard; it burned down in 1980 and was rebuilt as the pub that stands there now. The Forest Inn is the community local — chicken and leek pie that reviewers single out, a garden securely fenced for dogs, and a week that includes meat draws, quiz nights, karaoke and bingo.

The walking is the reason most people come. The Ashurst Stroll is a 2.8-mile loop from the station through Churchplace Inclosure, an oak plantation first enclosed in 1810, ending at the earthwork remains of a 16th-century saltpetre house. Ashurst Wood was once a Tudor centre for burning timber into saltpetre, the raw material for gunpowder. If you'd rather walk somewhere with a pub at the end, Lyndhurst is about two miles across the Forest, a well-worn station-to-station route.

Family days and village connections

For families there's Longdown Activity Farm, where you can bottle-feed kid goats and calves, meet Kunekune piglets, and take a bumpy tractor-and-trailer ride. Just down the road, the New Forest Wildlife Park keeps otters, wolves, wallabies and lynx. The Forest-edge campsite sits beside the woods.

The main road carries the everyday village — shops, restaurants and a veterinary practice along the A35. The post office closed in January 2019. Buses run on the Bluestar 6 between Lymington and Southampton.

Church, workhouse and Castleman's line

Christ Church at Colbury is the parish church, a flint building of 1870 by Benjamin Ferrey, financed by Frederick Ibbotson of what is now Colbury Manor. Its lychgate is a WWI memorial, and the graveyard holds unmarked burials of Ashurst Workhouse inmates.

The village was called Lyndhurst Road until the 1930s, after the station on the twisting line that Charles Castleman designed in 1844 and everyone nicknamed the Castleman Corkscrew.

Millvina Dean's final years

Millvina Dean, the last survivor of the Titanic and its youngest passenger at two months old, spent her final years in Ashurst and died here in 2009, aged 97.