Godshill

The Pit and the Pub

Across the road from the Fighting Cocks there is a shallow grassy depression. It used to be a cock-fighting pit, which is where the pub gets its name, and the pub gets its name because it has been sitting opposite the pit since 1927. These days the depression holds nothing more dangerous than rainwater.

The pub itself is worth the stop. The landlord, Tim Eyre, is a master butcher, so the meat is home-made — pork-and-nettle sausages, burgers, a duo of "Tim's faggots" with mash, onion gravy and peas. Janine Pulford, reviewing it for Dorset View, called the sausages "the tastiest I've ever eaten." There's chicken breast stroganoff with white rice, and a Belgian waffle with ice cream and strawberries, and a Baileys and coffee cheesecake if you've room. Jim, the kitchen hand, has been there about ten years.

Ales and the Village Edge

Five hand pumps run three continuously-changing cask ales and two ciders, and the cellar holds a five-star Cask Marque rating. Food goes from half past eight in the morning until half past nine at night, which covers most eventualities. Dogs come in on leads and are handed a biscuit. Outside, the seating looks over a large green where ponies and donkeys graze, and there's a play area at the back for children.

Godshill is a scattered hamlet rather than a village with a centre, strung along the B3078 on the north-west edge of the New Forest. The cottages are 18th- and 19th-century, cob and thatch mixed with brick and slate, with gorse and heather pressing in from the open Forest. There is no shop to speak of. Fordingbridge, a mile and a half west, supplies the shops, cafés and everything else; it's a five-minute drive, with a medieval bridge over the Avon at the far end of it.

Walking from Castle Hill

The walking is the reason most people come. From the Castle Hill viewpoint, a lay-by in Godshill Wood, a circular of roughly two and three-quarter miles follows the Avon Valley Path past Frankenbury, an Iron Age hillfort enclosing eleven acres half a mile west. The benches at Castle Hill look out over Breamore and the water meadows, with the Avon winding through the bottom of the valley. A longer round of about eight and a half kilometres takes in Woodgreen and Hale as well.

Layers of Ancient History

The land is old in the way this whole valley is old. On Cockley Hill to the east there's a burnt mound — an earth pit used for boiling water some three thousand years ago. At Armsley by the river, someone in 1959 turned up four Iron Age coins, a bronze brooch and glazed Roman pottery. Godshill does not appear in the Domesday Book at all, which for once means the surveyors simply never counted it.

Godshill Wood Folklore

Godshill Wood was once a Gypsy encampment, and folklore holds that the women went alone to a particular holly tree to give birth. The tree, presumably, is still out there somewhere among the others. Nobody has ever felt the need to mark which one.