This corner of the Forest, once perhaps the most beautiful, is now the least known, because, to most people, so inaccessible. It lies quite by itself. No railway yet disfigures its fields and dells. The best way to see it and the whole Forest is to cross the ferry at Southampton, and land at the hard at Hythe. And as we cross, behind us, amongst a clump of trees, rises the ruined west end of Netley Abbey Church, and the modern tower on Henry VIII.’s Fort; whilst, lower down, the new Government Hospital loads the shore with all its costly ugliness. If we have not, perhaps, yet reached the height of Continental profanity which has turned the Convent of Cordova into barracks, and St. Bernard’s Monastery at Clairvaux into a prison, and the Church of Cluny into racing stables, we yet seem to delight to place side by side with the noblest conceptions that ever rose in beauty from English ground, our modern abortions. There is not a cathedral town whose minster-square is not disgraced by some pretentious shed. And now Government not only invades the country, but chooses above all, the better to display our folly, that place which the old Cistercian monks had for ever made sacred by the loveliness of faith and work. Hythe is only a little village, but as its name shows, once the port of the New Forest.[63] The Forest, however, has now receded from it, and in this chapter we shall see nothing of its woods. The district, however, is too important in a historical point of view to be omitted. The walk, even though it is not over wild moors and commons, is still very beautiful. True English lanes will lead us by quiet dells, with glimpses here and there through hedgerow elms of the blue Southampton water, down to the shore of the Solent. So, leaving Hythe[64] and going southward, skirting Cadlands Park, we reach Fawley, the Falalie and Falegia of _Domesday_, where Walkelin, Bishop of Winchester, held in demesne, as Abbey land, one hyde and three yardlands. The whole of the manor was thrown into the Forest, but in its place now are ploughed fields and grass pastures. The church, with its central tower, stands at the entrance of the village, and its handsome Romanesque doorway shows plainly that the Conqueror did not destroy every place of worship. The building was partially restored in 1844, but the pillars on the north side of the chancel were copied from the original Norman work, which, with the three piscinas and the hagioscope, give it a further interest to the ecclesiologist.