New Forest ponies wander freely through Bank, and one of their preferred spots is the front porch of the pub, where they stand in the shade and peer over the fence into the beer garden. The pub is the Oak Inn, and it is more or less the only thing in Bank — no shop, no post office, no other community facility. The nearest of those is Lyndhurst, about a mile north-east.
Bank is a scatter of roughly thirty houses just south of the A35, deep inside the National Park, bounded on almost every side by woodland. A red K6 telephone box stands outside the pub. That, the ponies, and the Oak Inn are the centre of things.
The Oak is a two-storey painted-brick building from around 1719, thought to have started life as a cider house. It's Fuller's-owned, and the menu specialises in game and seafood — venison casserole, a fish platter of smoked salmon, goujons and prawns, peanut-crusted chicken, spiced-yoghurt shoulder of South Coast lamb, and a chickpea, spinach and sweet potato curry for anyone not in the mood for either. The Sharing Sunday Roast, at around £69.95, comes with pork or beef plus lamb cutlets and chicken and all the trimmings. Booking is recommended.
The beer is worth a paragraph of its own. Gales HSB, Gales Seafarers and London Pride are the regulars, with a rotating guest, and the cask ales come out of taps set into wooden cask-ends, propelled by a gas-powered pump arranged so the gas never touches the beer. Cyclists, walkers and horse riders all end up here, which is roughly the entire population of a New Forest afternoon.
The walking starts at the door. The Bank and Gritnam circular runs about seven miles on forest paths and gravel tracks, past a deer sanctuary early on, through inclosures of beech, oak and sweet chestnut that carpet with bluebells in late spring, then follows the Highland Water down into the trench it has carved through Brinken Wood. The Oak Inn is the half-way food stop, which is either good planning or good luck. A short drive south-west brings you to the Knightwood Oak, over five hundred years old with a girth of 7.38 metres, and the Eagle Oak nearby, named because the last sea eagle in southern England was reportedly shot from its branches.
Bank is a latecomer as settlements go — a sixteenth-century encroachment on the open Forest, originally called Annis' Bank, and still recorded as "Annesley Bank" in the 1861 Census. Japonica Cottage, the oldest survivor, is sixteenth century; Old Cottage on Pinkney Lane carries the date 1600 on an outside wall. Later it drew writers looking for a country retreat. Mary Elizabeth Braddon built a house here in the 1880s, Virginia Woolf spent Christmas 1904 at Lane End House, and the poet Rupert Brooke stayed nearby at Gritnam, writing afterwards to a friend: "And then for a few days it all dropped completely away, and — oh! how lovely Bank was!"
There's no station; Ashurst and Brockenhurst are each about four miles off, on the Waterloo line. But most people come by car, park at the Oak, and let the ponies get on with running the place.