New Forest Footsteps

Three fallow deer stand framed by fox gloves; evening light illuminating the hot pinks and green of fresh leaves in a stained-glass scene. All peace and reverence. But the soundtrack doesn’t quite match. Instead of birdsong the evening chorus consists of shouts, cracking cans, bellowing laughter. Human equivalents of territory marking, highlighting food sources, and attempted ‘wooing’s’ in the summer evening’s hazy heat. Longbeech Campsite is full to the brim, but the deer continue browsing, unbothered. As is the New Forest way: humans and wildlife side-by-side.

Longbeech is no stranger to human presence, even before the campers arrived. From 1942-1946 its tree cover harboured the buildings belonging to the airfield that stretched over the gorse-speckled Stoney Cross. The runway remnants today are traversed by ponies and cattle instead of aircraft. When the war was over, and the airfield redundant, the left over Nissen huts took on a new role: accommodation for those awaiting council houses. Families made their homes here, painted the stern grey stone and curved roofs of ex-military outcrop with cartoon characters. They fenced off plots with discarded barbed wire to make small gardens and to keep ponies from pestering. There was even a village hall, which doubled as a cinema on the weekends. An entire community created from the in between, from the waiting. My own Grandma one of them.

A small portion of her life was lived out here. She raised children, cooked meals, loved, laughed, and hurt where revellers now come for their holidays; where I now sit in my own campervan, watching deer in a dappled glade. I can’t help wondering if she stopped in this very same spot I’m sat in now, if she too peered into the space between the trees.

As the darkness takes hold and the foxglove’s colours mute, it strikes me that it’s not just the wildlife and humans brushing against each other here. Each era rubs up against the last. There is nothing new about this forest. Its air is thick with lives lived before, their now presence covered in leaf litter and moss, yet still as tangible as the bark on the trees that watched them come and go. Much like the deer that have now disappeared into their woodland realm, I can no longer see them, but I know they’re there.

Words and Image Jeni Bell

The May King

I think it was the rain that kept us concealed from each other for so long. Thick drops that bounced off leaf and bark and stone. They fell so heavily, in a wall of early-summer sound, that it must have covered the crunch of my boots on the track and stole the swish of my once-waterproof jacket. No, I don’t think you heard me coming. If you had I am certain you would have slipped off into the woods long before you did. And if I had seen you sooner, I’m certain I would have stopped; held in awe at your form as you emerged like a Will-o’-the-Wisp from the cow parsley and campion flanking the old road’s edges. But, as it happened, on that day drenched in rain and low-lying clouds, I didn’t stumble upon you until the very last moment. When we both drew in a breath, locked gazes, and you, adorned in your summer crown, stared back at the human unearthing you from the hedgerow.

I have seen plenty of roe bucks before, especially along this stretch of the drove, where they skirt the field edges ready to disappear into the treeline like they were never there; or heads poking out from crop cover, eyes wide and antlers gnarled as though carved from oak. But I have not been this close. Close enough to see the individual clumps of old winter coat falling doggedly as a new one, the colour of fresh rust, emerges. Close enough to see the rise and fall of a chest, and the tinge of lithe muscle in the back legs. Close enough to witness the breath before a body springs into action; the hair-trigger pull of a split-second decision played out less than an arm’s length in front me.

A young buck, not quite yet three points on your crown, but a true May King none the less dissolving back into a wild realm where I could not follow.

You left me there up on the old drove road, the rain a little lighter, but its drumming just as steady. I had spooked you from an afternoon’s rest, couched up amongst the cow parsley. The tangled cleavers and red-dead nettle now bent by your body; the only sign you’d ever been here at all. I suppose I could pick that apart, peel back the fronds of soon to be faded greenery in search of meaning. I could harp on about the fleetingness of things: how the hawthorn blossom will pass and leave the sweet sickly scent of decay, or the sun will soon replace the rain and leave dry brittle heat in its wake, and the green will turn to gold. I could dwell on how we should live solely in the moment because all too soon it will be gone. But I won’t. There’s no need. We all know that already. Even the May King knows he can’t outrun the turning of the wheel.

I placed my hand where you had been and felt the warmth press against my palm. A faint animal scent, mixing in with the unseasonably chilled air and the flourishing greenery. I wanted to sit in it, to curl up and take your place, just for a minute soaking in a deer’s eye view of the landscape. But I didn’t. A walker was approaching with a waddling Labrador following closely to heel and I wasn’t really in the mood to answer any awkward questions about why I was led out covered in cleavers. And, selfishly, in that moment I didn’t really want to share my experience: to tell this unknown person that I had held court, for just a few seconds, with the May King. Instead I carried on walking, offering a brief nod to the man and his dog. All the way onwards one eye on the track, the other watching the woods for another fleeting glimpse of you.