Old Hampshire Mapped
Cobbett's Hampshire
Transcription (89)Beaulieu Abbey
Lyndhurst
Beaulieu
New Forest
normans
map
From NEW PARK, I was bound to BEAULIEU ABBEY, and I ought to have gone in a south-easterly direction, instead of going back to Lyndhurst, which lay in precisely the opposite direction. My guide through the plantations was not apprised of my intended route, and, therefore, did not instruct me. Just before we parted, he asked me my name: I thought it lucky that he had not asked it before! When we got nearly back to Lyndhurst, we found that we had come three miles out of our way; indeed it made six miles altogether; for, we were, when we got to Lyndhurst, three miles further from Beaulieu Abbey than we were when we were at New Park. We wanted, very much, to go to the site of this ancient and famous Abbey, of which the people of the New Forest seemed to know very little. They call the place Bewley, and even in the maps, it is called Bauley: Ley, in the Saxon langauge, means place, or rather, open place; so that they put ley in place of lieu, thus beating the Normans out of some part of the name at any rate. I wished, besides, to see a good deal of this New Forest. I had been, before, from Southampton to Lyndhurst, from Lyndhurst to Lymington, from Lymington, to Sway. I had now come in on the north of Minstead from Romsey, so that I had seen the north of the Forest and all down the west side of it, down to the sea. I had now been to New Park and had got back to Lyndhurst; so that, if I rode across the Forest down to Beaulieu, I went right across the middle of it, from north-west to south-east. Then if I turned towards Southampton, and went to Dipten and on to Ealing, I should see, in fact, the whole of this Forest, or nearly the whole of it.
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