Beyond the village and facing the high road are the strangely impressive lodges of the historic estate of New Hall; new at the end of the fifteenth century, but declined into a respectable age by now and cobwebbed with much history and many legends. The place, now and for a considerable number of years past an alien convent, has been owned during a period of four hundred years by an astonishing number of historic personages, who have succeeded one another like flitting phantoms. Here the solemn reminder, "shadows we are," peeps out spectrally at every turn of Fate's wrist in the handling of the historic kaleidoscope. Built by Thomas Butler, Earl of Ormond, whose daughter and heiress became the wife of Sir Thomas Boleyn and mother of the unfortunate Anne, New Hall thus eventually came into possession of Henry the Eighth, who occasionally resided here and re-named it "Beaulieu." Elizabeth gave Beaulieu to Thomas Radcliffe, third Earl of Sussex. By this time it had resumed its name of New Hall. Later owners were George Villiers, the magnificent Duke of Buckingham, and Oliver Cromwell, who had it as a gift from Parliament and exchanged it so soon as he decently could for the more magnificent, convenient and king-like residence of Hampton Court Palace. To him succeeded another Duke of Buckingham, and to him that soldier and king-maker, the crafty Monk, Duke of Albemarle, who kept great state at the Hall and was visited here, when he was suffering from gout and dropsy, by that scribbling traveller, Cosmo, Grand Duke of Tuscany. With Monk the line of historic owners may be said to end, but constant change has ever been the lot of New Hall, and a succession of lesser lights followed him until the nuns set up their secluded life here and bade farewell to a vain world. That world passes by; the road on one side, the railway midway in the grounds, and if it gives them a thought at all, scorns them as morbid and idle malingerers from the work of the vineyard. [Illustration: NEW HALL LODGES] No glimpse of the Hall is gained from the road. All is emptiness, and the lichened brick and the crumbling stone vases of neighbouring boundary walls add to the melancholy air of failure and unfulfilled aims characteristic of the place.