day. There are some fine old houses in
the picturesque High Street, though none of them remember the day in
1154 when Henry II landed on the way to his coronation. The much
restored church will be best appreciated for the picture it makes from
the other end of High Street.

Though a fashionable resort in those days when any seaside town was a
possible future Brighton, Lymington is never likely to become crowded
with visitors again, but artists find many good studies on the river
and in the town and even on the "soppy" flats themselves, and there are
salt baths at high tide for those unconventional holiday-makers who
favour the place.

To resume the main route through the forest from Lyndhurst the western
road must be taken. It presently turns sharply towards the south and
penetrates the fastnesses of the woods lining the Highland Water. Here
we find the celebrated Knightwood Oak and the grand beeches of Mark
Ash, nearly two miles away in the depths to the right, but worth the
trouble of finding. In less than six miles from Lyndhurst the traveller
reaches the cross-roads at Wilverley Post on the top of Markway Hill,
and in another long mile Holmsley station on the Brokenhurst-Ringwood
railway. Then follows an undulating and lonely stretch of four and a
half miles of mingled wood and common and occasional cultivated land to
the scattered hamlet of Hinton Admiral, that boasts a station on the
South Western main line to Bournemouth. There is now but an
uninteresting three miles to the outskirts of Christchurch.

[Illustration: LYMINGTON CHURCH.]

The one-time Saxon port of Twyneham and present borough of Christchurch
(the change of name, like several others in the country, was due to the
over-whelming power of the ecclesiastical as opposed to on the secular)
has a similarity to Southampton in its situation on a peninsula between
two rivers before they form a joint estuary to the sea. But, alas,
although the waterways of the Avon and Stour are considerable,
Christchurch Harbour long ago silted up and the long tongue of land
that runs eastward across the mouth effectually bars ingress to
anything in the nature of a trading vessel.

The town, though pleasant enough in itself, has but one real
attraction for the visitor and, judging by the crowds of
holiday-makers brought in every day by motor, tram and train from the
huge pleasure town on the west, the study of ecclesiastical
architecture must be gaining favour with the