It’s a celebration of everything British,” declared the lady with the purple hair. She wasn’t talking about her royal rinse, but about the St Barbe Museum, in Lymington, an amiable place full of shop-dummy pirates and tinplate Horlicks adverts.

She could just as easily have meant the New Forest in general — a tract of countryside that is still tended the way it has been for 900 years, by the 350 “commoners” who pasture their ponies and pannage their pigs, and by eccentric aristocrats who’ve devoted their lives to collecting old James Bond cars and inventing new rhododendrons. Forest settlements feature vast village greens nibbled by itinerant ponies, and more hop-hung inns and beamy country-house hotels than seems strictly fair on the rest of us. And if you ever wondered where all those red telephone boxes went to retire ...

Don’t let the suggestion of time-warped gentility put you off, however: the New Forest also has a wayward side. It has the best surviving spread of ancient wildwood in western Europe, complete with bugling deer and venomous snakes, and long, surging miles of heather and gorse. If you believe the warning notices, even those cute little ponies could have your hand off.

This has been southern England’s favourite weekend playground since William I turned up, still sweaty from Hastings, and decided that he quite fancied spending his downtime from conquering there. The wildness survived the centuries, and the area’s new-found national-park status promises to make it feel more medieval than ever.

Today, millions come here, but most visitors venture no further than the nearest patch of picnic-friendly roadside verge. Within a few minutes of striding onto one of its brackeny trackways — from Fritham, say, or Bank — the forest closes behind you and you find yourself alone among the finches and the fungi, the air thick with shafting sunlight, feeling like Red Riding Hood on her way to grandma’s.

DAY ONE

Bank to Buckler’s Hard
Is it wrong to begin a driving weekend in a pub? Not if it’s the Oak Inn, at Bank (023 8028 2350; lunch served noon-2pm). Precisely 11 minutes after turning off the M27, you will creak open the gate, pass the sign saying “Please don’t feed the wild ponies”, and instantly know you’re in the forest. It’s one of those pubs that feels not so much built as hollowed out of the landscape.

Up the road is the town of Lyndhurst, self-styled “gateway” to the New Forest, which unfortunately tends to get blocked with Shoguns and Fronteras — beware of the bull bars. Head down the high street and take the first right into the wilderness. The short drive to Beaulieu is across trademark New Forest moorland, thickly thatched with pink heather and lit by a thousand bonfires of gorse. It’s all you can do not to pull up at every sandy trailhead, break out your boots and stomp off into the loveliness. Time for that tomorrow: we’ve a busy afternoon lined up, with tweed caps and baseball caps equally catered for.

Beaulieu (01590 612123; £14) is the home of Lord Montagu, the original New Forest fun guy. Best known for its hangar-sized National Motor Museum (everything from Del Boy’s Reliant Regal to Donald Campbell’s unreliable Bluebird), his lordship’s estate is a juggernaut heritage experience — abbey ruins, baronial “palace”, PlayStation zone, touchscreen trivia quizzes. Beaulieu even makes its own ice cream.

Most visitors steer straight for the James Bond cars, but you mustn’t miss the Secret Army exhibition, new for this year. It tells the real-life spy story of Beaulieu’s time as a finishing school for second world war spooks: look out for hush-hush messages concealed in gentlemen’s pipes and daggers disguised as ladies’ hatpins. It’s all very 007-and-sixpence.

If Beaulieu seems a bit souped-up to tackle in a single afternoon, you could settle for a potter around the immaculate estate village. With posh chocolate shops and doll’s-house cottages, it is as much a bygone as anything at the museum. Every brick and bollard is stamped with three red diamonds, the Montagu mark of ownership — even the tiles in the public lavatories. It’s almost enough to make you yearn for the return of feudal England.

Get back in your car (trying not to wish it was a 1959 Morris Oxford) and make for another tourist honeypot, Buckler’s Hard, the boatyard that helped to beat Bonaparte. There is surprisingly little to see here — just a single grassed-over street of 18th-century houses, marooned on a meander of the River Beaulieu among saltmarsh and trees. The buildings peter out into a broken quay and the river slinks impercept-ibly towards the sea. Buckler’s Hard is mostly an atmosphere, which is why it’s best to arrive after the trippers have left, when it is reserved for those sleeping or eating here, at the Master Builder’s House Hotel (01590 616253, www.themasterbuilders.co.uk).

The hotel is good, especially if you get a room in the old wing, where the shipwright Henry Adams oversaw the building of Agamemnon, Lord Nelson’s favourite man o’ war. Doubles start at £180, B&B, or £242 for the old wing. A three-course dinner starts at £29.50 per head.

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