About five miles up from the sea is St Leonards, once a part of the abbey domain. From close by one gets one of the finest views for miles round, with peeps of Hurst Castle, the Needles’ passage, and distant Spithead, and the Isle of Wight itself, to the south, stretched out widely east and west. The ruins of St Leonards consist of a portion of the walls of a great granary fully 220 feet in length and 50 feet in width, which is now covered with ferns sprouting from every crevice, and a beautiful little chapel, the walls, floor, and windows of which are covered with a mass of plants, weeds, and creepers. Both gables of the chapel are still standing, and from beneath the ivy peep out remains of rich carved niches and tracery. In its decay the deserted sanctuary presents a lovely picture, for flowers blossom on the walls--amongst which are to be found dog roses, cranesbill, yellow barberry, wallflowers and brambles. The ancient farmhouse, the garden of which the chapel adjoins, is a handsome old house containing low, comfortable rooms, and a row of dormer windows in the roof; and the lover of the picturesque should certainly visit lovely, though ruinous, St Leonards. In Beaulieu River there are four tides, not two, and thus it presents a rapidly changing aspect of silvery flood and ebb, which at times leaves much of the bed bare with patches of yellow gravel and here and there little pools and saltings, where seafowl and birds disport themselves and feed, and glistening squadrons of white-plumed swans sail statelily to and fro. Into this river, with its tiny winding creeks, which, in some instances, seem to run up into the woods themselves, in ancient times crept Danish galleys and French pirates intent upon attacking and despoiling the rich, peacefully situated, and beautiful Abbey of Beaulieu, of which, alas! few traces now remain; and thus it was that later in the history of the little red-bricked village which lies at the head of this romantic waterway, one John, Duke of Montagu, fortified his Palace of Beaulieu with moat and towers and battlements against the dreaded attack of the French privateers, who, slipping into the Solent between the Needles and Hurst Castle, made occasional raids up the Beaulieu River. The beautiful woods which for miles clothe the river banks are probably not less ancient than the most historic portion of the New Forest itself, for there seems little doubt that the land here was wooded ground since the beginning of history. So broad is the river but a little distance below Beaulieu that, apart from the tides, there is little to suggest that it is other than an inland lake; and certainly nothing in its silent tree-clad hills to apprise the wanderer along its banks, either upwards from the sea or downwards from Beaulieu, of the existence of the strange, half-deserted village which suddenly comes upon the view round a sharp Z-like bend of the river.