Inside the Turfcutters Arms there is a collection of turfing irons on display, which are the tools commoners once used to cut turf and peat for fuel. The right to do this was called turbary, and it gave the pub its name. It is one of the few traditional Forest pubs left — flagstones, beams, a log fire, and a large garden with enough parking that motorhomers on the Brit Stops scheme pull in overnight.
The kitchen is the main reason to be here. Line-caught beer-battered fish with chips and peas is £18.50, home-cooked ham and eggs £17, the Turf's pie of the day £18, and a ploughperson's built around cheddar, ham and a pork pie £17.50. On Fridays two portions of fish, chips and peas come to £30. There is a mushroom stroganoff for the non-committal and a kids menu at £8. The bar pours Ringwood Ales, keeps Gales country and fruit wines, and stocks over eighty malt whiskies, which is a lot of whisky for a village strung along one road.
Dogs are welcome, well-behaved ones anyway, and there is live music many Friday nights and Sunday afternoons.
The village smuggled. Contraband came ashore at Pitts Deep and a spot called Brandy Hole, and one local legend has the smugglers drinking brandy out of their shoes after a shipment went wrong. An 1834 parliamentary report described the residents of what was then Beaulieu Rails as "for the most part smugglers and deer-stealers." The name Beaulieu Rails came from the wooden railings marking the western edge of Beaulieu manor; the place grew up along them, and only became a civil parish in its own right in 1929.
St Paul's Church went up in 1839, red brick, tall lancet windows, funded by public subscription at a cost of £900. One account calls it "an early Victorian red brick structure of no great architectural distinction," which is fair, though a west-end gallery dominates the small interior.
For a place this quiet, East Boldre has an outsized aviation history. On 1 May 1910, William McArdle and J. Armstrong-Drexel gave a public flying display here in two Bleriot monoplanes, on a heathland strip cleared by hired local lads — Britain's second flying school. The Royal Flying Corps took the field over in 1915 to train pilots for the Western Front, and a second airfield, RAF Beaulieu, followed across the road in 1942. In 1917 a British aeroplane crashed into the village post office.
Walking starts at Hatchet Pond, the largest freshwater in the area, sitting on old marl pits that were flooded about two centuries ago to power a mill. From there a circuit crosses Beaulieu Heath and takes in Rans Wood and the old airfield sites. Ponies loiter at the water's edge. Dartford warblers and silver-studded blue butterflies are the things to look for.
Brockenhurst, the postal town and nearest station, is a few miles off along minor roads; the buses are sparse, so bring a car. Beaulieu and its motor museum are about five miles away, and Buckler's Hard, the old shipbuilding village, is a twenty-minute cycle down quiet lanes.
The film director Ken Russell lived here in a thatched cottage until it burned down in 2006, taking much of his equipment with it. He moved to Lymington. The ponies stayed.