Day 76: Lymington and Bosham

Dinner in the Bournemouth hotel was not good. Standard coach party variety ‘four courses for a tenner’ and all pre-prepared and pre-cooked. But at least it wasn’t fish and chips, and the delightful Hungarian waiter found me amusing enough to give me twelve after dinner mints with my coffee!

Yesterday’s grid locked southern Britain coast roads made Ros and I very wary of going into Southampton or Portsmouth on this part of my trip.

Far from this being a one off life event, I intend to make this journey again as soon as I have saved up and go clockwise,  arriving at the East coast of Britain in July rather that the South West. I will make good on all the bits I have had to miss and visit places on the Suffolk coast and the South coast with more time to explore. Like Bill Bryson, but not leaving it so long between revisits. 

But today we are heading to Eastbourne so that I can drop Ros off and save her a seven hour train journey.

Ros managed to get a full refund on her train ticket while I was being screamed at by a woman taxi driver in a yellow cab for pulling up to wait for Ros in front of the railway station.

"Move your f..king a..e off the crossing you f..ing imbecile!” she screeched out of her window, pulling up beside me.

"I’m not on the crossing. As you can see -  I’m in front of it. I’m not preventing anyone from crossing, and there aren’t any yellow lines."

"Are you f..king blind? You are blocking the taxi exit!”

"If I were, and I am not, how did you get out?" I asked very reasonably given her unnecessarily aggressive communication and wondering what the poor fare paying passengers thought of her demonstrating a tendency to episodes of road rage.

“What do you think those f—king parking bays are for then?” she shouted, driving past me tyres squealing.

Fact - I am not local and this is not my railway station and I had not seen the row of parking bays until she mentioned them. I think she could have handled it differently. And thank goodness she is not driving me anywhere.

Ros back on board, we took a left off the jammed roads outside Bournemouth and found ourselves travelling across country, through leafy lanes and towering trees, towards Lymington in the New Forest. And the sun came out.

In a tiny village called Sway, in Hampshire, we spotted what had to be a folly. It was extremely tall and seemed to have curtains at the windows so it was possibly inhabited by someone, though being 13 stories high and so narrow,  how did anyone get up to the top?

We Googled it in a lay-by and Google suggested it was 66 metres high and a grade 2 listed building and the first concrete building to have been erected in Britain. The chap who built it was Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson, a highly colourful character who had run away to sea as a boy, travelled in India, become a lawyer, made a fortune as lawyers tend to do, and retired to Hampshire and built the tower.

I thought it was a lighthouse but also thought it wasn’t near enough to the sea. I was right and wrong.  It can be seen from the Solent and Trinity House, in charge of Lighthouses round our coastline, forbade a light at the top in case it confused shipping!! There is a suggestion that Mr. Peterson is buried at the top!

On to Lymington, which has become one of my favourite towns of the whole trip. The market was in full swing and what a great weekly market it is – as good as anything I have seen anywhere.

The town was buzzing. What a shame we weren’t staying in the New Forest. I would have liked to explore little villages further but it’s a good reason to revisit perhaps later in the year.

A sandwich in a favourite hotel of Ros’s and we were off again into the New Forest National Park.

I was still hoping to glimpse some of the New Forests famous wild horses. I wasn’t disappointed

We saw cattle, horses and donkeys on the roads and on the verges beside the roads. At one point a large white stallion who had been placidly munching grass in the verge as we approached, got spooked and reared up and came rushing straight onto the road towards us. I slammed on my brakes just in time to avoid him crashing down on top of Gloria. Since we had the roof down he would have done all of us serious damage, not to mention harming himself.

The cars behind me saw what was happening and fortunately we all managed to avoid the potential nasty accident.

The village of Bosham was our next stop because I had heard somewhere that in the churchyard at Bosham was the grave of the young daughter of the famous King Canute. I wondered if it were true.

Bosham was busy. It was holding its annual church summer fete, a quintessentially English affair in the manor house

with stalls...

Strawberries and cream with plastic champagne glasses full of chilled Prosecco

(yep your eyes do not deceive – one and a half glasses each as it was three for two!)

Plastic duck races and a brass band.

Bosham is one of the prettiest villages on the south coast. Ros learnt to sail here in the Dark Ages. It has art galleries and craft shops to attract visitors and pretty houses but I was interested in the church.

Holy Trinity Church is probably one of the oldest Saxon churches in Sussex.

 It’s mentioned in the Bayeux tapestry...

which was a record of the events leading up to the invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066. It has links therefore with Westham and Pevensey Bay near Eastbourne and Hastings.

I discovered that what I had heard is a long held tradition rather than a fact, that King Canute young daughter was drowned in the mill stream and was buried in the church. In 1865 a small stone coffin was found in front of the chancel arch. No one knows  if it is the princesses coffin for sure but it brings tourists in anyway.

We got back to Eastbourne in time for Ros to be collected by Crispin and taken back to Wittersham in comfort.

I managed to avoid detection from my neighbours and slept in my own bed for the first time tonight  in 76 days but I did not unpack anything, for tomorrow, I intend to rewind and go back along the coast to complete my journey the way I had originally planned stopping in Worthing and then in Brighton.