A water tower stands over Exbury, built to supply a garden. That tells you most of what you need to know about the place. This is an estate hamlet on the southern edge of the New Forest, a mile or so from the Solent, made of buff-coloured brick cottages that were put up all at once in the 1820s to house estate workers. There is no pub in the village and no shop. What there is, instead, is 200 acres of rhododendrons.
The gardens are the reason to come. Lionel Nathan de Rothschild bought the near-derelict Exbury House in 1919 and spent the rest of his life on the woodland garden — the acid soil and gentle climate suited rhododendrons, azaleas, camellias and magnolias. He described himself as a "banker by hobby but a gardener by profession." The peak display runs late April to early May, when the Daffodil Meadow and the River of Gold do their work. One of the most famous hybrids raised here, in 1933, is a rhododendron called Naomi, named after his daughter.
Since 2001 you can see the garden by steam. The Exbury Gardens Steam Railway is a 1¼-mile miniature line, and the ironwork on its station carries the Rothschild five-arrow crest, cast by the Ballantine Bo'ness Iron Company. It was Leopold de Rothschild's idea.
For food, there is Mr Eddy's Restaurant and Tea Rooms at the gardens, which feeds the garden and railway visitors. For a pub you have to leave the village. The nearest is the Royal Oak up at Hilltop on the Beaulieu road, which advertises an excellent range of real ales and ciders and homemade food. It started life in 1848 as a tearoom and lodging for cyclists.
The walking is the other draw. The Lepe Loop is a five-mile circular around Lepe and Exbury, mostly easy going with three stiles. A slightly longer route, just under six miles, starts at the gardens and runs through field and woodland paths to Lepe, where the views open across the Solent to the Isle of Wight. Lepe Country Park sits about a mile and a half away — a mile-long beach with pine-fringed low cliffs and a nature reserve full of wading birds.
The Church of St Katherine was built in 1907, the third church on more or less the same ground: it replaced an 1827 church, which had replaced a medieval chapel first mentioned in 1291. Cistercian monks from Beaulieu Abbey used to cross the river on stepping-stones to serve that chapel. The 13th-century Purbeck-stone font survived all the rebuilding. The church is now on the Heritage at Risk register, its stonework badly eroded.
There is a war in the village's recent memory too. In 1942 the Royal Navy requisitioned Exbury House, code-named it HMS Mastodon, billeted 300 men in barracks and used the place to help plan the Dieppe raid and D-Day. Down at Lepe they built Mulberry Harbour caissons and ran the PLUTO fuel pipeline out under the Solent.
Getting here means driving — Brockenhurst station is ten miles off and the buses barely run. You reach it along the B3054 through Beaulieu, past the water tower, into a village that was moved here on purpose.