110 The Neil' Forest : its History and its Scenery. 



than anywhere else. Here, on all sides, stretch woods and 

 moors. Here, in the latter end of August, the three heathers, 

 one after another, cover every plain and holt with their crimson 

 glory, mixed with the flashes of the dwarf furze. And a little 

 later the maples are dyed, yellow and russet, by the autumn 

 rains, and the beeches are scorched to a fiery red with the first 

 frost, and the oaks renew, but deeper and more gloriously, the 

 golden lights of spring, till the great woods of Prior's Acre 

 and Daneshill burn with colour ; every gleam of sunshine, and 

 every passing shadow, touching them with fresher and stranger 

 beauty. 



To the east, about two miles along the Southampton Road, 

 lies the village of Cadenham, famous for its oak, which, like the 

 Glastonbury thorn, buds on Christmas Eve. The popular 

 tradition in the neighbourhood runs, that, as the weather 

 is harder, it shows more leaves, and, refusing the present 

 chronology, only buds on Old Christmas night. As in most 

 things, there is some little truth in the story. Doubtless, in 

 some of the mild winters which visit Hampshire, the tree shows 

 a few buds, as at that time I have seen others do in various 

 parts of the Forest. Of course, they are all nipped by the 

 first approach of severe weather, which, however, seldom happens 

 on the warm south-west coast till the new year. 



Down in the valley to the left of Rufus's Stone rise the 

 woods of the Long Beeches, and Prior's Acre, and Danes- 

 hill or Dean's Hell, where the word Hell (from helan, to 

 cover) means nothing more than the dark place, like the Hell- 

 becks in Yorkshire.* Beaten paths and walks stretch into 



* The word, however, is going out of use, and is more generally noAv 

 softened into hill. We meet with it in the perambulation of the Forest 

 made in the twenty-second year of Charles II. — " The same hedge reaches 



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