Through a large window on the high street you can watch chocolate being made. The Beaulieu Chocolate Studio has occupied the old village patisserie since July 2006, one half shop and one half working workshop, and behind the glass Trevor Smith turns out more than thirty kinds of filled chocolate, from pocket-money rabbits to boxed things you would think twice about eating. Smith spent eight years in France, trained as a baker and chocolatier and ran his own bakery in the Loire Valley before coming home to the New Forest. His assistants are Avril and Judith. Chocolate has been made and sold in Beaulieu since the early 1980s, which is a long time for a village of 806 people to sustain a habit like that.
Beaulieu is pronounced "Bewley," and getting that out of the way early saves a certain amount of trouble. It sits at the tidal head of the Beaulieu River, on the south-eastern edge of the New Forest, and the whole village — river included — is privately owned by the Montagu family of the Beaulieu Estate, which is an unusual thing to be able to say about an English village. The focal point is water: a large mill pond held back by a weir, old brick and cob cottages, and the grey ruins of an abbey behind them. In 2020 Condé Nast Traveler put it fifth on a list of the most beautiful villages in the UK and Ireland, and you can see the argument for it.
The narrow high street is lined with handsome brick dwellings from the seventeenth century, some now given over to shops. Belle & Blossom is a flower studio run by Fin, a gardener by trade and a qualified florist, who sells cut flowers, plants and what she calls meticulously sourced homeware and furniture. There is an art gallery, a gift shop, the village stores, and two tea rooms. The Beaulieu Bakehouse belongs to Dominic Ide, who opened it after his coffee house Pallets and built it on the site of a florist called "Sheer Elegance — Flowers of the Forest," which his grandmother Brenda started here more than thirty years ago. The Bakehouse does breakfast until half past eleven and lunch after that — avocado on toast, eggy bread with mushrooms, ham egg and chips at £12.75, homemade soups and stews — and it is, by all accounts, very friendly and very dog friendly.
For something with soil attached, Steff's Kitchen sits inside Fairweather's Garden Centre, where many of the café's vegetables and salads are grown a few steps away in Patrick's Patch, a working kitchen garden on the high street. Fairweather's has been run by the same family for sixty years and holds the largest collection of Agapanthus in the country, more than three hundred rare cultivars; Patrick Fairweather won RHS Plant of the Year at Chelsea in 2023. It is a lot of horticultural firepower for a village this size.
The pubs are spread out. In the centre, the Montagu Arms began life as a sixteenth-century coaching inn — first "The Ship," then "The George," taking the Montagu name in 1742 — and hosted the annual Beaulieu fairs from 1607 and a cattle market until 1809. Its informal pub arm, Monty's Inn, pours award-winning Ringwood real ales and does home-cooked classics: scotch eggs, game pies, a British cheese ploughman's it bills as the best in Hampshire, fish and chips, apple crumble. The hotel's fine-dining room, the Terrace, held a Michelin star from 2010 to 2017, earned under Matthew Tomkinson on dishes like a cannelloni of braised rabbit with black pudding purée; the star is gone now, but the wood-panelled room with its 1920s feel and its cheese trolley remains. One guest left a review that runs to the end of the enthusiasm scale: "The Montagu Arms is without doubt the best hotel I have ever experienced in England."
A mile out on the forest edge, on the B3056, the Royal Oak at Hilltop started in 1848 as a tea room and lodging for cyclists. Debbie and Duane Lewis run it now, keeping the wood and brick and adding a garden with five horse corrals, because the clientele includes horse riders as well as muddy walkers, children and dogs, who get mats and water bowls on request. The Ringwood Fortyniner on the pump was named by the brewery's founder Peter Austin after the 1849 gold rush; it is 4.9 per cent, which is either a coincidence or a good joke. Reviewers single out the chicken roulade and a sea bream special as a cut above the usual.
The third pub is a walk away, and worth making the walk for. From the village car park a flat path of gravel and grass follows the west bank of the tidal river south to Buckler's Hard — about 2¼ miles one way along the Solent Way, or a 4.4-mile there-and-back, moving from woodland into tidal grassland and salt marsh with wide estuary views. Birdwatchers come here for Dartford warblers and hobbies. At the end of it is the Master Builder's House, a 1729 building that was the home of Henry Adams, the Master Shipbuilder who ran the Buckler's Hard yard, and whose pub, Henry's, is a cosy boozer with honest food and a good beer list overlooking the river. Ships for Nelson's navy were built on the slipways directly below. The hotel's smarter dining room, the Riverview, runs to a Brixham monkfish tikka skewer under head chef Ben Cartwright, and there is a tea room at Buckler's Hard, the Captain's Cabin, whose two cream teas — the Admiral's, with cheese scones and Cheddar, and the traditional Captain's — divide opinion; the Cream Tea Review gave it five out of ten, which is at least honest reporting.
The other great walk stays up on the heath. Beaulieu Heath is a broad open expanse of gorse, heather, bramble and bracken, and a 2.9-mile circular follows the perimeter track of an old wartime airfield across it, flat and level with sightlines to the Isle of Wight on a clear day. The flatness is not an accident. This was RAF Beaulieu, opened in August 1942, and on D-Day the P-47 Thunderbolts of the USAAF's 365th Fighter Group took off from here to attack German positions in Normandy. Most of the concrete has been lifted and the ground returned to heath, but the runway outlines are still there underfoot. About a mile and a half from the village, Hatchet Pond is the largest freshwater in the Forest, man-made, no swimming allowed, and ringed by ponies, cattle and donkeys wading in to drink. Donkeys wander into Beaulieu itself; the gates and cattle grids mark where the village stops and the open range begins.
There is a great deal for a week's stay. New Forest Activities, based in the village, holds the exclusive licence to paddle the privately owned river, and runs family canoeing from eighteen months upward — £34 an adult, £25.50 a child, under-fives free for ninety minutes, with an option billed as a guided trip to the pub. They hire bikes too, onto more than a hundred miles of largely off-road routes, and the old aerodrome makes a flat, safe loop for children learning to ride. The Beaulieu attraction itself — Palace House, the abbey, the National Motor Museum with its 285-plus vehicles and four land-speed-record cars — includes "Little Beaulieu," a large wooden play palace with slides, secret passageways, a treetop walk and a zip wire, which one family review calls "probably the best playground in the New Forest and it's difficult to get our children to leave." The museum's monorail, opened in July 1974, is the oldest in England and runs straight through the roof of the building.
The history here is unusually deep for a place that did not exist in 1086 — Beaulieu has no Domesday entry, because the land was still royal hunting forest. King John founded the abbey in 1204, staffing it with thirty Cistercian monks sent directly from Cîteaux in France, the only British house populated straight from the order's mother house. The legend, which historians treat as dubious, is that John did it in penance after a dream in which a group of abbots he had mistreated scourged him with rods; he woke still aching. The medieval name was Bellus Locus Regis, "the beautiful place of the king," from which Beaulieu descends. The abbey held one of the strongest sanctuary rights in southern England, and over the centuries it sheltered fugitives from the Battle of Barnet and the pretender Perkin Warbeck; at the Dissolution in 1538 thirty-two of them, debtors and felons and worse, were still living on the ground.
Henry VIII's men demolished the great church — some 335 feet long — but spared the monks' refectory, which has been the parish church ever since. Its outstanding feature is the thirteenth-century reading pulpit, a stone lectern reached by a stairway cut into the width of the wall, from which one monk read improving books aloud while the rest ate in silence; there is said to be only one other like it in England, at Chester. The altar sits at the south end rather than the east, because the room was never designed to be a church. Inside there is a 1651 monument to Mary Do, dead at forty, and a memorial to Eleanor Thornton, who was secretary and secret mistress to the 2nd Baron Montagu, modelled for the sculptor Charles Sykes, and is widely held to be the face of the Spirit of Ecstasy on the front of every Rolls-Royce. She drowned in 1915 when the liner she was travelling on was torpedoed in the Mediterranean; Montagu, beside her, survived.
Buckler's Hard began as a failed dream. The 2nd Duke of Montagu was granted the Caribbean islands of St Lucia and St Vincent in 1722, laid out a free port on the river to service the sugar trade, and watched the whole scheme collapse when the French drove his expedition off the islands. The half-built town reverted to its old name and found new purpose as a shipyard, where Henry Adams oversaw some forty-three Royal Navy ships built from New Forest oak — among them the Agamemnon, Nelson's favourite. During the war the estate ran finishing schools for the Special Operations Executive; the instructors included Kim Philby, some years before anyone knew he was a Soviet agent. In 1952 Edward, Lord Montagu opened the house to paying visitors and founded the motor museum, and for a few years in the late 1950s the grounds hosted the Beaulieu Jazz Festival, which ended in the pitched "Battle of Beaulieu" of 1960 between rival factions of jazz fans.
W. H. Hudson, walking through in 1903, wrote that the village, "with its ancient water-mill, its palace of the Montagus, and the Abbey of Beaulieu, a grey ivied ruin, has a distinction above all Hampshire villages." The tide mill ground corn into the early twentieth century and then made animal feed until about 1942, and is silent now. Getting here without a car takes some doing — the nearest full station is Brockenhurst, six or seven miles off, with a taxi around £20, though the little halt at Beaulieu Road sits out on the heath four miles north, and in season the open-top Green Route bus links the village with the Hythe ferry, Lyndhurst and Lymington.
Out on the heath by that lonely station, the New Forest pony sales still run several times a year, mostly in autumn after the foals are rounded up in drifts. The sales moved to Beaulieu Road when the railway arrived, so the ponies could go by rail, and they never left. Anyone can turn up and watch.