Page:The New Forest - its history and its scenery.djvu/131

Rh Mark Ash, and, circling for hours round the trees, will again fly back to its favourite haunt.

All these woods there are for rambles, flushed in the spring with wood-anemones and wood-sorrel, set in the green moss and the greener heather of the bilberry. Nowhere, too, in the Forest, than in these woods, have I seen more lovely sunsets. Through some deep-cut oriel of the trees have I watched the sun begin to sink, each moment burning brighter, and then suddenly its great brand of fire would fall, reddening each tree trunk, and crimson billows of clouds come rolling eastward.

Instead of following the Ringwood Road, beautiful as that is in many parts, especially at Woody Bratley, with its old thorn trees, we will turn off to the right. To the west now rises Ocknell Wood, and its clump of firs, a well-known landmark, and beyond that lies the new Slufter Inclosure, and Bratley Plain, with its great graveyard of barrows. In front of us stretches the East Fritham Plain, with its three barrows, locally called "butts," the central known as Reachmore. At the second mound we will go into North Bentley Wood, following the wood-cutter's track. Very wild and unfrequented is this. Here a stray deer will bound across the road; and sometimes a small herd of as many as six or seven are browsing on the ivy clinging to some tree just felled, startled at the slightest sound, and trooping off down the glades. The grey hen rises up at our feet from the heather; and, as we enter the wood, the woodpecker shrieks out his shrill laugh, whilst a buzzard is heavily sailing over the trees.

The road winds on through the valley amongst oaks flecked with silver flakes of moss, broken here and there by open glades and green spaces of fern. At last, we reach Queen's North Lawn, 113