Ponies & Tranquility, Jane Austen’s New Forest

by Janet Halliday
Trees in thick green leaf fuzz the banks of the Beaulieu River. The foliage wall is pierced occasionally by inviting, narrow inlets through the trailing branches, or by the lawns of big houses where nobody seems to live. Songbirds call, gulls wheel overhead and an egret flaps up from the tidal marsh between the trees and the main channel. The water shines in the sun, and it feels softly warm when I trail my fingers in it. My kayak drifts as I rest and bask.
I'm paddling slowly up-river, in the slack water between tides, between the hamlet of Bucklers Hard and Beaulieu village...