The Royal Oak serves only cold food, and it means it. This is a 17th-century thatched free house on a 50-acre working farm, and its menu is a short list of ploughman's plates: home-baked honey-glazed gammon with Lyburn cheese at £15.50, a version with homemade pork pie and sausage roll at £16, specials like New Forest Smokery trout pâté or goats cheese with honey and edible flowers at £16.50. No hot kitchen, by choice — it's one of very few New Forest pubs still doing this to keep its character. If you want something cooked, a fish and chip van turns up fortnightly and Liguori's fire up wood-fired pizza every Thursday from 5pm.
Inside are three rooms with old beams, New Forest paintings, and two fireplaces. The fireside table is first-come-first-served, which matters here because the table appeared on BBC's Remarkable Places To Eat and people now want to sit at it. There are six mostly-local real ales and two ciders on tap — Bowman's Royal Oak Bitter is brewed in Droxford — and the place has held a spot in CAMRA's Good Beer Guide for over fifty years.
The garden is enormous. The brief describes it as able to "absorb almost limitless numbers," and there's a marquee in the yard for when the New Forest weather does what it does. Dogs are allowed. Neil and Pauline McCulloch have run the pub and the farm since 1998; before them, one family held it for ninety years.
There is no shop. The pub is the shop — pork pies, quiche, cheese and trout pâté over the bar.
Fritham sits high on the northern plateau of the Forest, near the Wiltshire border, and the Forestry England car park is where most walks begin. Eyeworth Pond is about ten minutes on foot, a quiet dammed pool created in 1871 and now home to mandarin ducks, fed by a fenced chalybeate spring called Irons Well. Longer routes run out to Cadman's Pool through the Sloden and Holly Hatch inclosures, or circle round to the Rufus Stone, which marks where King William II caught an arrow while hunting in 1100.
The pond and the surrounding calm are misleading. From 1865 the Schultze Gunpowder Factory operated at Eyeworth, where a Prussian artillery captain named Edward Schultze made the first successful smokeless powder. At its peak it was the largest nitro-compound gunpowder works in the world — sixty-odd buildings, a hundred staff, three-quarters of the planet's sporting gunpowder. It closed in 1921. What's left is the pond, Powder Mill Road (built so explosives wagons could avoid the village), Irons Well, and a black postbox at the car park, put up by the company to spare the postman the walk down to the factory.
The Fritham Free Church, a brick chapel from 1904, holds memorials to the Hickman brothers, who were among seven local men who sailed on the Titanic in 1912.
There are no buses. The lanes are narrow, off the B3078, but the A31 and M27 are close enough that you can leave the motorway and reach the ponies in minutes. They graze the lanes here — ponies, cattle and donkeys, wandering where they like.