New Forest, Hampshire, February & August 2025
The New Forest is a national park in Hampshire famous for its free-roaming ponies, ancient woodland and wide open heathland, shaped for nearly a thousand years by commoners' grazing rights. Ponies, cattle, deer and even the occasional donkey wander freely across roads and villages, while the landscape changes a lot through the seasons: bare winter woodland gives way to one of the largest expanses of lowland heath in Europe, turning a hazy purple-pink each August.
Several visits across 2025 caught both ends of that transformation. February brought frosty mornings around the forest and Brockenhurst, with a striking all-white pony grazing among bare trees, fallow deer picking through the undergrowth, native cattle in the mist, and a run of small woodland birds (robins, chaffinches, a greenfinch and a long-tailed tit) working the hedgerows. An August return coincided with the heather in full bloom, with New Forest ponies grazing in purple heathland and a butterfly on the heather.
