Boldre doesn't have a middle. The church, the cottages and the two pubs are scattered across seven and a half thousand acres of farmland and woodland above the Lymington River, so finding any one of them tends to involve a lane you weren't certain was a road. The parish stretches to take in Pilley, Battramsley, South Baddesley and a few other hamlets, none of which cluster either. There is no green, no square, no obvious place to stand and say you have arrived.
The Red Lion is the pub most people mean when they say Boldre. It dates to the 17th century, or the 15th depending on who you ask, and it is named after the Stratford Lyon — a giant red lion with stag's antlers that a verderer called John Stratford supposedly drew out of Haresmede wood in the early 1400s, with sightings reported into the twentieth century. The kitchen leans on what's local: fresh Lymington dressed crab, venison from the Forest, beef Wellington, and puddings that people drive for — smoked Hampshire trout pâté with pickled cucumber and malted grain bread, roast Hampshire beef with Yorkshire pudding and creamy leeks, lime and stem ginger cheesecake. There's a vegan cherry lattice pie served with New Forest vegan vanilla ice cream. Dogs get treats. The garden has a covered patio for when the New Forest does what it usually does.
Over at Pilley, the Fleur de Lys makes a bolder claim: oldest pub in the New Forest, first pint traced to 1096, with a list of landlords going back to 1498 displayed inside under a thick thatched roof. The food matches the ambition — Steve's aged fillet beef Wellington at £40, whole grilled lemon sole with caper butter, a whole dressed Isle of Wight crab, Sunday roast sirloin.
St John the Baptist sits, in the words of the parish itself, "high on a hill and well away from any kind of village, dominating the surrounding countryside of field and wood." The core is late-11th-century chalk rubble and flint, and three sarsen stones in the foundations suggest people were worshipping on the spot around 2000 BC. A huge iron key once carried by the monks of Beaulieu Abbey is still used to open the doors. Inside is a memorial to HMS Hood, whose last admiral worshipped here before the ship went down to the Bismarck in 1941 with all but three of 1,418 men; the Book of Remembrance lists 1,415 names.
The walking runs from the church down through Roydon Woods, an ancient-woodland nature reserve of coppiced hazel, butcher's broom and wild garlic, crossing the Lymington River twice on a level four-and-a-bit-mile loop. Bluebells in spring, mud in winter, dogs on leads throughout.
Lymington and its station are two miles south; the A337 does the rest. The Domesday surveyors thought less of the place — in 1086 the manor was recorded as waste, no villagers, worth three pounds to a lord named Hugh of St Quentin.
William Gilpin was vicar here from 1771, the man who taught England the word "picturesque." He funded schools for forty village children partly by selling his own drawings, and he's buried in the churchyard on the hill he wrote about.