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.
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