Woodgreen

Food, Ale and Welcome at the Horse and Groom

The Horse and Groom has stood on Woodgreen's High Street since around 1740, which makes it older than most of the village around it. It has a large front bar, a smaller one for locals, and a restaurant. The food is all-day and locally sourced: steak and ale pie, a duck pancake pizza, cheese and jalapeño soup, deep fried brie, and a rotation of South African dishes among the specials. The Sunday roasts get singled out for praise, and the portions are generous enough that reviewers mention it. One TripAdvisor review is titled simply "I wish all country pubs were like this."

Four handpumps pour three regular ales plus a guest — Hop Back, Downton and Dead Duck have all appeared — and the pub is CAMRA LocAle accredited. There is seating at the front and a small garden at the back, and visiting dogs are handed biscuits.

The Community Shop and the Village on the Walls

The other hub is the Woodgreen Community Shop and Post Office, which the village owns outright. It was threatened with closure in 2006; rather than lose it, residents spent more than four years campaigning, bought the lease, and reopened on 14 May 2011. Bread is baked on the premises, cakes are made fresh daily, and there is ice cream, local produce, crafts and a New Forest information point, with tea, coffee and seating indoors or out. The shop describes itself as "a meeting place, communication centre, and an important lynch-pin of village life," which after that campaign is hard to argue with.

The village hall, built in 1930–31, is the reason people who don't live here turn up. It is Grade II listed, not for its architecture but for its murals. A local resident, Vaughan Nash, came up with the idea; his friend Sir William Rothenstein, a former Principal of the Royal College of Art, secured a £100 Carnegie grant for two RCA graduates, Edward Payne and Robert Baker, to paint them. The oils were thinned with paraffin wax and turpentine, and about fifty named locals appear, with their names on plaques beneath: poachers looking down from Castle Hill, folk dancing, fruit picking, the flower show, the Horse and Groom, cider-making, and the caretaker lighting the stove.

From Reading Room to St Boniface

St Boniface, the church, started life in 1913 as a reading room and was dedicated as a church only in 1949. It is modest and unlisted, and shares its parish with neighbouring Hale.

Walking to Hale and Castle Hill

The walking is good. A 5.7-mile circular links Hale and Woodgreen across woodland and field tracks, past the thatched cob cottages of Hatchet Green and a wildlife pond thick with dragonflies. One mile south is Castle Hill, a motte-and-bailey earthwork raised over an Iron Age hillfort, possibly a siege castle from the 1148 fighting between Stephen and Matilda. Its viewpoint over the Avon valley has been drawing visitors, the record notes, for two hundred years.

A Forest-edge Settlement and How to Arrive

Woodgreen is not old by New Forest standards. It grew from a late-1600s squatter settlement of families scratching a living on the Forest edge, and became a parish of its own only in 1858. Dean station, on the Salisbury line, is the nearest rail; otherwise it is minor lanes off the A338 and a car. Its own welcome pack calls it "the New Forest's loveliest village," and the murals suggest it has thought so for a while.