A Coven of Witches sits on the main road through Burley, selling crystals, spell books, tarot decks, sage and beeswax candles, and it has done since 1955, which by its own account makes it the first Wiccan shop in Britain. It was named by Sybil Leek, the white witch who lived here in the 1950s and walked the village in a long black cloak with a jackdaw on her shoulder. It is not the only one of its kind. The Sorcerer's Apprentice sits across the road, and there are more scattered nearby — Cobwebs & Crystals, Witchcraft, Away with the Fairies. That is a lot of occult retail for a scattered forest village, and Burley does nothing to play it down.
The animals reach you before the witches do, though. Ponies, donkeys and cattle wander the streets and lanes, standing in the road as if they own it, which in a sense they do — they belong to local commoners exercising rights of pasture on the open Forest, and they are not wild. The New Forest Explorers Guide records that they "habitually wander village streets and lanes, grazing where they can, but sometimes also begging tit-bits from passers-by." You are asked not to feed them. They are so much a fixture that Burley's fire station is reputedly the only one in the country with a cattle grid at its entrance, to keep the stock out of the appliance bay.
There are three pubs, and they are not interchangeable. The Queen's Head sits in the centre and began life as a blacksmith's forge in 1685. During renovation a secret cellar was found beneath the floor of the Stable bar, stashed with pistols, coins, bottles and other goods — one of the hiding places of the local smuggling band, back when brandy, tea and tobacco came through the Forest on hidden paths. It is now a Chef & Brewer, which some regulars feel has flattened its character, though the venison burger, fish and chips, ribeye and lamb shank still bring the crowds and the Bakewell tart still finishes them off. The New Forest Deer Safari — a tractor and trailer that runs through Burley Park to see red deer, with maize and beans handed out to feed them — departs from right next to the pub on summer weekends.
The White Buck stands just outside the village core on the Bransgore road, in about three acres of woodland, and is a Fuller's house with a kitchen run by head chef Thomas Baker. The menu is more ambitious than the average forest pub: Fuller's award-winning game faggots with mash and kale, slow-braised pork belly with mushrooms and chard, Frontier battered haddock, pan-roasted scallops with chorizo and peas, triple-cooked chips dusted with smoked paprika salt, a salted caramel tart with pecan praline. It also runs a prix fixe. Not everyone loves the prices — sea bass at around £25 and an adult Sunday roast at about the same have drawn grumbles about corporate portions — but the twenty en-suite rooms with Egyptian cotton linen make it the place to put people who want a proper bed.
The Burley Inn is the freehouse, run by Steve, who reviewers describe as very hands-on and friendly, and it is the one to drink in if you care about the beer. The cask ales come from Flack Manor, Andwell and the Itchen Valley Brewery, there are log fires inside and a terraced deck overlooking the village, and the kitchen does honest pub food, a Sunday roast, and cream teas at any time of day. It has eleven refurbished en-suite rooms and is the starting point for the main walk out of the village. Dogs are welcome by arrangement, though the designated dog area is on the small side when it fills up.
For daytime eating the choice is unusually good. The Shappen Café opened in October 2022, built from oak with an acorn for a logo, and sits alongside Shappen Stores and its butchery, which has traded on the same site since 1908. It cooks the Shappen breakfast, homemade quiche, focaccia with pesto, mozzarella and tomato, Dorset apple cake, a coffee walnut cake people go out of their way for, and a Honeycomb Hot Chocolate; there are pizza nights every Friday. The butchery next door is worth its own visit. It started with the Pratt family, became F Moorman & Son in 1924 for three generations, and was taken over in 2017 by Nigel and Charlotte, who kept Nick Hill as head butcher, stock Longhorn beef, and in 2020 launched a nationwide delivery arm at newforeststores.com. It is now butcher, general store and post office in one.
The Old Farmhouse Restaurant and Tea Rooms is a thatched New Forest cottage that has been a tea room for over a hundred years, run now by Peter and Cathy Cutler. Its window seats look straight out onto the passing ponies, donkeys and cows, the rooms have inglenooks, and the menu runs from traditional English through Italian, Thai, seafood and French, with cream teas served all day. It also hosts murder mystery dinners, which is a lot of range for a cottage. A mile and a half out at Holmsley, the Old Station Tea Rooms occupy the former railway station and do a cream tea of freshly made scones, thick cream and a choice of jams, dogs welcome on the sheltered old platform.
The other thing to buy in Burley is cider. New Forest Cider, on Pound Lane at Littlemead, was founded in 1988 when Barry Topp bought a 1950s hydraulic press at auction and started making the real thing again. It is a full family effort — his son John leads the pressing each autumn, and the wider Topp family run the shop, office and sales; they have been New Forest commoners since 1988. The cider is full-juice and unpasteurised, poured straight from the barrel: a Dry, Medium and Sweet, a Kingston Black single-variety vintage that Barry rates as their strongest, an Oak Soaked, and a bottle-fermented Cider Bouche made by the French keeving method. Every October there is a steam-pressing weekend using hand-operated twin-screw presses over a hundred years old. The Burley Fudge Shop, going since 1980 and run by Chris and Jenny Tabb with seasonal specials from their daughter Charley, makes handmade fudge including gluten-free, vegan and sucrose-free. Both are stops on the Burley Food Trail, a self-guided route of three-and-a-bit or five miles that strings the eating together.
Most people come for the walking, and the best of it starts from the front door. The Burley Village circular is about four miles: out from the village past New Forest Cider, across the grassy meadow of Burley Beacon, then up Castle Hill Lane to the Iron Age hillfort on the ridge, with views across the Avon valley, before dropping back through Chapel Lane and Church Lane past the church. Castle Hill itself is a rare thing here — a hillfort of about five acres standing 308 feet up, roughly 2,500 years old, one of very few in the whole New Forest. For a shorter loop the Turf Hill circular heads south through the gorse onto open heath that turns purple and pink with heather in late summer, with Sway Tower visible in the distance. Families tend to take the level cycle route to Brockenhurst along the old railway line; you can hire bikes in the middle of the village, or ride a horse-drawn wagon with N&J Heavy Horses instead. There is a cricket club, a football club and a golf club, too.
Burley is not in the Domesday Book — it was extra-parochial forest land and did not get its own entry. The nearby Ringwood record, thought to cover these woods, lists fourteen villagers and six smallholders with seven ploughs, a mill worth thirty pence, and woodland yielding pannage for 189 pigs, which is how eleventh-century clerks measured a wood: by how many pigs it could fatten on acorns. The name is older still, from the Saxon words for a fortified place and a woodland clearing. By 1212 the de Burley family held the manor, and they kept it until 1388; Edward I once granted the village and the manor of Lyndhurst as a dowry to his second wife, Margaret of France.
The village had to wait until 1839 for its own church. St John the Baptist was built by Charles Underwood on land given by the lord of the manor, enlarged in 1886 by the Victorian architect William Butterfield, and in its churchyard lies Constance Applebee, who introduced field hockey to the United States and died in 1981 at the age of 107. On the bank opposite the Queen's Head sits a plainer monument: a stone inscribed "Rest and be thankful" and "Peace Restored 27th March 1802," set up by Thomas Eyre, who ran the manor estate for half a century and left instructions in his will that every 23rd of October, at this stone, shoes, clothes and blankets should be handed out to twelve poor women and girls.
There is a dragon in all this, of course. Folklore has it denned on Burley Beacon and flying each morning to nearby Bisterne to terrorise the village until it was placated with milk and mutton, at which point a knight named Sir Maurice de Berkeley built a hide, lay in wait with two loyal dogs, and killed it. Which is why, of the several ways to spend a morning in Burley — cider from the barrel, a hillfort, a tractor-load of red deer — the one that stays with people is the tea room where you can sit in the window with a scone and watch a donkey amble down the middle of the road, entirely unhurried, as though it has somewhere to be and knows you'll wait.