into distant woods. Most beautiful is this road in the spring. Stand on the top of Clay Hill, about the beginning or end of May, and you shall see wood after wood, masses of colour, the birches hung with the softest green, and the oak boughs breaking into amber and olive, made doubly bright by the dark gloom of firs, the blackthorn giving place to the sweeter may, and the marigold on the stream to the brighter lily.
On our left lies New Park, now turned into a farm, where in 1670 Charles II. kept a herd of red deer, brought from France, but previously used as a pound for stray cattle. Passing on by a roadside inn with the strange sign of the "Crown and Stirrup," referring to a pseudo-relic of Rufus's, preserved at the King's House, but which is nothing more than a stirrup-iron of the sixteenth century, we reach Lyndhurst—the lime wood,[1] the capital of the Forest, the Linhest of Domesday.
William the Conqueror at one time held the place, which was once dependent on the royal manor of Amesbury. Here, after
- ↑ An objection, that the lime-tree was not known so early in England, has been taken to this derivation. This is certainly a mistake. In that fine song of the Battle of Brunanburh, we find—
"Bordweal clufan·
Heowan heaþolinde·
Hamora lafan."
(The Chronicle. Ed. Thorpe, Vol i. p. 200.)The "geolwe lind" was sung of in many a battle-piece. Again, as Kemble notices (The Saxons in England, vol. i., Appendix A, p. 480), we read in the Cod. Dip., No. 1317, of a marked linden-tree. (See, also, same volume, book i., chap, ii., p. 53, foot-note.) Then, too, we have the Old-English word lindecole, the tree being noted for making good charcoal, as both it and the dog-wood are to this day. Any "Anglo-Saxon" dictionary will correct this notion, and names of places, similarly compounded, are common throughout England.
