Hard by the station, on a bare plot of ground, once a small village green, stands the smithy at the meeting of the ways. It bears date 1540, and from the reign of Henry VIII till that of Edward VII a Masters shod the horses of travellers at this spot; now it has passed into other hands. Just beyond the forge a low-browed workshop and thatched cottage used to stand a little back from the road, where Mr. Pope and his forebears for many generations--one may say for many centuries--practised a unique industry, the making of hobby horses, for which the district has been famed time out of mind. The little old premises with precious store of wood were burnt in a disastrous fire one Christmas night; but the old business is still carried on, though in new quarters, and still the traveller may see in the station yard piles upon piles of these conventional steeds of exactly the same pattern, beloved of our ancestors in their childhood, straight-bodied, straight-legged, standing on four little wheels, so as to be dragged along by a string, each adorned with a narrow strip of fur nailed along his neck to represent a mane, and brightened with daubs of red or blue paint, laid on with just the traditional touch. They go forth in their hundreds--north, south, east, and west--to find a market; so the children must love them still, and have not grown too sophisticated to find joy in their crude suggestion. As we go up the village we note, with a sigh, how fast new shops are ousting old thatched cottages, and new names replacing the old, though still one, Purkess, said to be the lineal descendant of the charcoal burner who conveyed the body of the slain king to Winchester, carries on a long-established grocery business. Brockenhurst is hardly so much one village as a bundle of hamlets loosely tied together, rejoicing in such names as Shark's Island, Gulliver's Town, or the Weirs. Even the parish church is not in the village, but stands alone on a knoll at the edge of the park, nearly a mile away; but then it has only of late years been made a parish church, having existed anciently as a chantry chapel, probably a timber or wattled structure. Portions of the present building, the nave and the beautiful south door, date from the twelfth century. The Early English chancel is a later addition, and very much later is the north aisle with its prim Georgian windows. It is thought the dedication to St. Peter was made either when it was rebuilt in stone or when the chancel was added. About the end of the eleventh century it was placed under the charge of the vicar of Boldre, and after the Reformation it remained attached to Boldre as a chapel-of-ease, served by the same vicar until 1866, when it was made into a separate ecclesiastical parish, the advowson being sold by John Peyto Shrubb to John Morant of Brockenhurst Park.