On the sea-coast near Milton, rise high gravel-capped cliffs, with a basis of Barton clays, cleft by deep ravines, locally known as “bunnies.” Inland, valleys open out, dipping between low hills, whilst masses of beech and oak darken the plains. Here and there, marking the swamps, gleam white patches of cotton-grass, whilst round them, on the uplands, spread long, unbroken stretches of purple heather; and wide spaces of fern, an English Brabant, studded with hollies and yews, some of them as old as the Conquest. Here and there, too, as at Fritham, small farmsteads show their scanty crops of corn, or, as at Alum Green and Queen’s North, green lawns pierce and separate the woods, pastured by herds of cattle, with forest pools white with buckbean, and the little milkwort waving its blue heath on the banks. These are the main characteristics of the New Forest, and, in some points at least, were the same in the days of the Red King. Nature, when left to herself, even in the course of centuries, changes little. The wild boars, and the wolves, and the red deer, are gone. But much else is the same. The sites and the names of the Forest manors and villages, with slight alterations, remain unchanged. The same barrows still uplift their rounded forms on the plains; the same banks, the same entrenchments, near which, in turn, lived Kelt, and Roman and Old-English, still run across the hills and valleys. The same churches rear their towers, and the mills still stand by the same streams. The peasants, too, still value the woods, as they did in the Conqueror’s time, for the crop of mast and acorns,—still peel off the Forest turf, and cure their bacon by its smoke.[5] The charcoal-burner still builds the same round ovens as in the days of William the Red. Old-English words, to be heard nowhere else, are daily spoken. The last of the old Forest law-courts is held every forty days at Lyndhurst. The bee-master—_beoceorl_—still tends his hives, and brews the Old-English mead, and lives by the labours of his bees. The honey-buzzard still makes her nest in the beeches round Lyndhurst, and the hen-harrier on the moors near Bratley. I suppose this is what strikes most persons when they first come into the New Forest,—a sense that amidst all the change which is going forward, here is one place which is little altered. This is what gives it its greatest charm,—the beauty of wildness and desolateness, broken by glimpses of cultivated fields, and the smoke of unseen homesteads among the woods. Yet the feeling is not quite true. Like every other place in England, it has suffered some change, and moved with the times. Instead of the twang of the archer’s bow, the sunset gun at Portsmouth sounds every evening. The South-Western Railway runs through the heart of it; and in place of the curfew’s knell, the steam whistle shrieks through its woods.