Wedding Photographer New Forest — Ancient Oak Woodland, the Heathlands and Beaulieu
The New Forest is England’s most ancient and most atmospherically distinctive royal hunting forest — a 219-square-mile area of ancient pasture woodland, heathland commons and medieval inclosures in south-west Hampshire, established by William the Conqueror as a royal hunting ground in 1079 and maintained by the Crown until the twentieth century’s statutory protections, whose ancient oak and beech pollards, the free-roaming ponies, donkeys and deer and the extraordinary ecological richness of the unenclosed heathland together create a portrait landscape of pre-agricultural English countryside character unlike any other. For New Forest wedding photography, the forest’s portrait landscape of Mark Ash Wood’s ancient beech pollards, the Beaulieu River’s tidal estuary and the open heathland of Beaulieu Heath provides a portrait environment available only in this one surviving medieval royal forest in southern England.
Mark Ash Wood, the Ancient Pollards and the Open Forest
Mark Ash Wood — the National Trust’s most extensive surviving ancient beech pollard woodland, where enormous centuries-old beeches with their massive gnarled trunks and branching multi-stem pollards create a cathedral-like woodland portrait environment of primeval forest character — provides the New Forest’s most dramatically ancient woodland portrait setting. The twisted, multi-stemmed forms of the centuries-old pollards (each managing the tree’s growth by periodic lopping to provide wood for charcoal and tools) create a portrait environment of extraordinary organic sculptural complexity. The free-roaming New Forest ponies grazing the open commons at Burley, Fritham and Beaulieu Heath provide a specific wildlife-enriched heathland portrait character unique to the Forest’s commoning tradition.
Beaulieu, the Solent Estuary and the Forest’s Village Churches
Beaulieu — the village with the tidal Beaulieu River’s estuary, the National Motor Museum and the Cistercian abbey ruins of Beaulieu Abbey (dissolved 1538, the refectory converted as the parish church of St Mary the Virgin) — provides the New Forest’s most architecturally distinguished portrait setting: the tidal river’s reed-bed estuary with the salt-marsh beyond and the ruined abbey above the bank combine three quite different portrait settings within a single village. The medieval churches of Lyndhurst (with Lord Leighton’s pre-Raphaelite fresco in the nave), Fordingbridge and Breamore (Saxon long-and-short quoins and the Saxon chancel arch of c.1000) provide traditional English church wedding portrait settings of considerable historical depth. The New Forest coastline at Milford-on-Sea and Barton-on-Sea, where the chalk cliffs of the Needles are visible across the Solent, provides a tidal shoreline portrait setting.