It’s autumn in the New Forest, the home of Wild Boar Press, and I was down in Burley earlier today researching for a book we are hoping to create next year. I had a lovely walk past three tumuli on the ridge of Cley Hill.
I was hoping to see not boars, but pigs on the Forest while I was out exploring. It’s pannage season on the Forest, the time of year when local farmers turn their pigs out to eat the acorns and beachmast that are poisonous to the ponies and cattle who roam freely here. I didn’t see any pigs today sadly, and passing a large oak tree I only saw one acorn!
The New Forest is the largest tract of unenclosed land in southern England. It’s an area of open heaths of yellow flowering furze and purple heather beds, ancient copses and beautiful, extensive valley mires. Autumn‘s here are phenomenal, a cascade of copper and gold, against the chestnuts and browns of the ponies and deer.
Autumn is a time of gathering and digesting and last freedoms before the winter sets in, and that mimics (sort of!) what we’ve been doing here at the press! Our first book was published in 2023. The King’s Mark: Poetry of the New Forest was such a joy to create and is available to buy on our website or by clicking here. But now we’re back with a new title and in my next post, I will introduce it properly in a way that it deserves! But for now, I’ll leave you with a New Forest poem from The King’s Mark! Enjoy the autumn! KJ
SONNET TO THE FOREST YTENE
by Charlotte Smith
Along thy wood-lanes wild, or shrubby lawns,
Or hollow dells, or glens befring’d with thorn;
Where from its ferny lair, at early morn,
The forester alarms the timid fawn,
I would ’twere mine to wander; —or when fade
The gleams of evening into shadowy night:
What time on many a stem or grassy blade
The glow-worm hangs her fairy emerald light,
I would behold the moon-beams fall among
The far retiring trees, and lengthening glades,
And listen the low wind, that thro’ the shades
Conveys the night-bird’s soft love-labour’d song:
For here the soul unruffled feels its powers,
And seeks the Hermit Peace within his forest bower.
Speak soon!
