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New Forest Walks for Beginners: Easy Routes Through England's Ancient Woodland
The New Forest is not what most people expect when they hear the word ‘forest’. It is not a dense, uniform woodland but a varied landscape of ancient oak and beech woods, open heathland, bog, and river valley, threaded through with gravel paths and forestry tracks and home to free-roaming cattle, deer, and the famous ponies that have grazed here for centuries. Created as a royal hunting ground by William the Conqueror in 1079, the New Forest has been a managed landscape for nearly a thousand years.