Ponies, donkeys, cows and pigs amble past the front door of the New Forest Inn, which is roughly what you'd expect from a pub where the road out the back leads to a deer sanctuary. The animals have right of way here, being the Forest's and not anyone's. The pub sits on the road up from Lyndhurst, its wooden floors split over several levels, spacious but arranged so that no part of it feels like a corridor.
It was the New Inn once, and it goes back to at least the first half of the nineteenth century. The kitchen does a seasonal menu plus a specials board — hearty pies, fresh fish, vegetarian and vegan and gluten-free options — but the thing it's known for is the Sunday roast. Reportedly around 200 of them, week in and week out, which for a village on a hilltop is a considerable number of roasts. Tripadvisor gives it 4.3, mostly for the atmosphere and the roasts.
The beer is taken seriously. It's Cask Marque five-star rated, with Flack Manor's Double Drop and Ringwood Fortyniner as the regulars, a couple of changing ales and Purbeck No. 10 cider. There's a covered patio that leads down to a sloped wooded garden, and a beer and music festival every July. Visit the New Forest calls it "the ideal pub for dog walkers, cyclists and horse riders," and it's hard to argue when the horse riders are outnumbered by the free-roaming pigs.
Emery Down is the highest part of Lyndhurst, clustered on a hilltop about 1.4 miles north-west of the town, with views over the Forest toward the Solent. Below it sits Swan Green, a cricket pitch beside a group of thatched cottages that the New Forest Explorers Guide describes as "perhaps the most photographed thatched cottages in the whole of England." Apartments there have recently gone for between £550,000 and £799,950, which is a lot for somewhere this quiet.
The walking starts more or less from the pub door. The Bolderwood road runs to the deer sanctuary, where a platform looks over a meadow and keepers feed the fallow deer daily from April to September. Closer to hand there's the Emery Down and Pikes Hill circular, taking in Allum Green, Swan Green, the eighteenth-century Cut Walk and Highland Water — crossed by an old bridge the locals call the Roman Bridge. You step or jump the side-streams, and when it floods you earn the walk. About two miles west is the Reptile Centre at Holidays Hill, free to get in, with open-air pens of adders and grass snakes and a mile-and-a-half trail through the old woodland.
The whole village bears one man's stamp. Admiral Frederick Moore Boultbee lived here from 1856 until 1876 and paid for the lot — Christ Church, built by William Butterfield in 1864, the village school that ran until 1950, and five almshouses. Harry "Brusher" Mills, the Forest's snake catcher, grew up here before moving to a charcoal-burner's hut and sweeping the cricket pitch at Balmer Lawn between innings.
Conan Doyle stayed a year while writing The White Company. The Forest, unsurprisingly, is in the book.