Natural beauty

Rather than just forest, as its name would suggest, the New Forest is a patchwork of ancient and ornamental woodland, open heathland, rivers and valley mires and a coastline of mudflats and saltmarshes. It contains the largest area of lowland heath in southern England, a rare habitat that once covered this part of the country. But the New Forest is not a natural landscape, it has been shaped by man, by history and by the grazing of animals for many hundreds of years.

Land management by farmers and landowners is crucial for the New Forest.

Since the time of the earliest prehistoric forest settlements, agriculture has been the basis of the rural economy and way of life on the more fertile land surrounding the heathland, valley mires and pasture woodlands, locally known as the open forest.

Much of the fertile area was enclosed as private farmland at the time the Royal forest was formed, and many of the fields still show typical medieval boundary patterns.

The farming economy remains the major land use in the National Park, and has retained close links with the central open forest which is used by commoners to graze their stock.

If you manage land in and around the New Forest and Avon Valley there is a free, independent advice service for you called the Land Advice Service.

Over the years, trees have been used for many things in the New Forest. They provide us with shelter, fodder for cattle, food for humans, and charcoal for fire.

They have also been hewn into some fantastic items, including furniture, musical instruments, toys, bowls and sculptures.

They are havens for wildlife, and the fascinating world of fungi depends on them too. Trees also play an important role in combating climate change by capturing harmful carbon emissions from the air around us.

The National Park boasts 26 miles of lesser-known but very important coastline.

The New Forest’s coast is a mix of wildlife-rich shingle, saltmarsh, lagoons and mudflats, and much of it is protected by law for its importance for nature.

Home to many species, particularly birds, the coastal mudflats are a vital refuelling post for tens of thousands of migrating waders that include godwits, snipe and avocet.

Where there are large concentrations of wading birds, there are often also predators such as peregrine falcon.

There are also large flocks of Brent geese that overwinter on the Forest’s coast from their Siberian breeding grounds. They come in their thousands to feed on the eel grass beds.

Heathland is rarer than rainforest. The New Forest has the most extensive area of heathland remaining in Europe (over 10,000ha – the equivalent of 14,000 football pitches). Drier areas are dominated by heather, with bracken and gorse and a very rich lichen flora.

The term heathland is used to describe a number of different habitats such as heather dominated heaths, grasslands and waterlogged bogs or mires.

Each of these elements of heathland has its own characteristic species and ecology. Heathlands develop where the geology and soils suit the heathland vegetation.

Dominant species
Common heather (ling) and related low growing shrubs belong to the heather family of plants (ericaceae). Heath habitats are dominated by these ericaceous shrubs with different species favouring different soil conditions.

Dry heath
Dry heaths are dominated by ling, bell heather and gorse. They are found on the dry, freely draining podzol soils. The diversity of higher plants is usually low but interesting lichen communities develop. Mature dry heath is important for the Dartford warbler, sand lizard and smooth snake.

Wetter heath
As the ground becomes wetter, ling cannot compete and wet heath plants such as cross-leaved heath, purple moor-grass and deer grass are common. This type of community is found on gently sloping valley sides and low lying depressions.

The central core of the New Forest extends across an elevated plateau, sloping gently from north to south towards the Solent Coast.

Rivers and streams cutting through the plateau have formed gently sloping valleys between low flat-topped hills and created much of the rolling landscape towards the centre of the Forest. Towards the north the valleys are deeper, whilst near the coast the land is flatter and more open. The whole area is contained within a downfold of the surrounding chalk, forming part of the Hampshire Basin.

The New Forest National Park sits in the Hampshire ‘Basin’ – a shallow dip surrounded by the chalk downlands of Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset with the prominent ridge of the Isle of Wight to the south.

Gravel, sand and clay predominate, dating from the time when the entire New Forest area was a shallow sea or large river estuary. The landscape is punctuated by a number of sand and gravel pits, both disused and active.

On the surface, the New Forest National Park is a mixture of poor soils in flat, gravelly areas; richer clay and loam that is well-drained; and water-logged, marshy bogs or mires. The bed of clay a metre or less below the surface is a hard, impervious layer and creates the saturated, spongy earth that is characteristic of large parts of the National Park. Forest soils are generally derived from soft clays and sands, overlain in many areas by deposits of flint, gravels and windblown brickearth.

The New Forest is one of the most intact networks of wetland habitat in western Europe.

Its mires, bogs, ponds, rivers and streams are one of the Forest’s most precious qualities and a key reason why the area was designated a National Park.