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