The New Forest & High Corner Inn: A Taste of the Wild, a Touch of Comfort – Travel Review
By Kevin Pilley, November 2026
He stood there in the middle of the road, looking at us glazedly through the windscreen. He didn’t move out of the way.
He looked as if he had been on the local tanglefoot.
Or Hampshire cider.
Or maybe a nosebag of cider fruit scones.
His tail swished back and forth like windscreen wipers.
Only a horse could cause a ten-car tailback in the New Forest. In the south of England, commoners’ rights have been respectfully observed for centuries. Horses always have the right of way.
“Ancient”
Pigs too.
The New Forest – now the largest remaining tract of unenclosed pastureland, heathland and forest in the country – was created by William I in 1079. Many were controversially evicted so the king could “pursue hart”.
Once known as Ytene (Jute – after the early Anglo-Saxon tribe), it became “a harbour for wild beasts… and affordeth great variety of Game where his Majesty oft-times withdraws himself for his divertisement.”
Commoners still enjoy the privilege of the right to collect fuel wood (“estovers”) and fuel (“turbary”), dig clay, graze their livestock and, during the “pannage” season, or “common of mast”, turn out their pigs to hoover up the acorns, which are toxic to cattle and ponies.
Five species of deer (red, roe, fallow, sika and muntjac) still inhabit the ancient forest, sharing it with 3,000 cattle, 5,000 horses and 200 “jacks” and “jennies” (donkeys).
The New Forest is perfect for bicycle lovers as well as horse lovers, cow lovers, donkey lovers, dog lovers and bat lovers.
“Rustic charm”
A member of Butcombe Pubs and Inns, which offers some of the best pub food and accommodation in the UK, the stylishly “reimagined” seventeenth-century High Corner country pub even has a squash court.
For the exclusive use of bats.
The pub, a former R&R residence for officers of the Canadian Army during the Second World War, has rooms, but its squash court could not be reimagined. It is now a protected roost.
The High Corner Inn, reached down the well-named Rocky Road, is in the middle of woodland. Horses stand outside, not waiting to be saddled but enjoying the kitchen air vents and relief from flies. They help bolster the country ambience and the atmosphere of rustic charm. You can smell the rurality. Staying at the High Corner, you will never be short of country air.
I asked the man in a digger collecting manure to put some in the back of our car for our garden. He said he could do more than that if I opened the sunroof.
Manager Charlie April (a French Canadian) and her team, including welcoming front-of-house man Tony and waiter Laurence, ensure bipeds receive the same Hampshire hospitality as the four-legged and waggy-tailed.
“Hideaway cabins”
High Corner Inn is the definitive dog-friendly hotel, with Digby dog shampoo and conditioner available from reception, plentiful towels and even a dog bathtub-cum-K9 spa.
The seven-room, truly rural country pub in Linwood, four miles from Ringwood, also offers new hideaway cabins. If it’s your birthday, especially if it falls on a Wednesday, take your passport. Butcombe offers free drinks if you spend £40 on food, and 25% off drinks for Loyalty Club members on Wednesdays.
We enjoyed two big rump steaks with a bottle of wine for £40 and didn’t have to lie about our age. In the summer, the High Corner has an outdoor cinema. We had just missed Mrs Doubtfire.
Woodland walks include Splash Bridge and Dockens Water, Sloden and Broomy Inclosures (including the ancient Elephant Oak) and, if you walk at one pint per hour, there is the three-mile Red Shoot circular, which takes you past the other local. On Tom’s Lane.
Most people visit the 219-square-mile New Forest National Park (one of the UK’s smallest national parks, officially designated in 2005) to spoil their dog, go pony trekking, see the wild horses, the rootling pigs and roaming donkeys, perhaps sight the rare mole cricket or European honey buzzard, hear a curlew or a cicada (Cicadetta montana), seek out wild gladioli or wet heath gentian, follow the old railway lines like the nine-mile Castleman’s Corkscrew by bike or on foot, retrace old mail coach routes on bespoke horse-drawn carriage tours or visit the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu.
The Motor Museum
“Pioneers”
Coinciding with the launch of the Jaguar XJ12, the National Motor Museum opened in 1972. Its origins date to 1952, when John, 2nd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu’s son and heir displayed five veteran cars as a tribute to his father. One of the pioneers of motoring in the United Kingdom, John was the first person to drive a motor car into the yard of the Houses of Parliament and introduced King Edward VII (then the Prince of Wales) to the joys of motoring.
As well as early vehicles and all kinds of automobilia, the collection includes Mr Bean’s lime-green Mini, Doctor Who’s Bessie and a Jaguar XKR Convertible used in the Bond film Die Another Day. Also on display is an 1886 Benz Patent-Motorwagen, widely regarded as the world’s first production automobile, a Napier Gordon Bennett (one of the earliest British racing cars) and the Sunbeam 350hp, which, in 1925, was the first car to achieve a speed of 150mph.
It also boasts a collection of Rolls-Royce radiator mascots – the Spirit of Ecstasy, also known as the Flying Lady. The latest addition to the nearly 300-strong vehicle collection is the Peninsula Hotels’ 2006 Rolls-Royce Royal Phantom VII.
The most quirky mode of transport must be the Outspan Orange Mini.
If cars and dog walking are not your thing, you can contract chronic “Yacht Envy” passing boatyards and marinas, taste “Old Thumper” and “Boondoggle” ales at the Ringwood Brewery, e-cycle or pedal-push on the flat, well-tarmacked roads or off-road on designated trails through the heath, golf, walk the Monk’s Trail, or scale Picket Hill, Telegraph Hill or Piper’s Wait (423ft).
Lymington
“Outdoor bath”
There are also the Georgian seaside market town of Lymington, Exbury Gardens and Light Railway, Fordingbridge’s seven-arched medieval bridge crossing the Avon (you no longer get arrested for transporting venison over it) and the Pre-Raphaelite church of St Michael and All Angels at Lyndhurst, where Alice Liddell – the inspiration for Lewis Carroll’s Alice – is buried.
Just as a stay at the High Corner Inn calls for a sybaritic outdoor bath (for dogs), no visit to the New Forest is complete without toasting the former royal playground with a pint of “Orchard Reveller” or “Snake Catcher Scrumpy” cider, the latter named after the nineteenth-century adder-catcher Harry “Brusher” Mills, who supplied London Zoo and believed boiled adder was good for rheumatism.
But don’t drink too much or you’ll end up looking like a commoner with the rather mottled complexion of a local Gloucestershire Old Spot. And end up standing in the road being beeped at.
Nearly legless and certainly tailless.
For more info visit:
highcornerinn.co.uk
butcombe.com
Kevin Pilley is a former professional cricketer and the ex-chief staff writer of PUNCH magazine. His humour, travel, lifestyle and food & drink work appears worldwide. He has been published by over 600 titles.
