People

• William the Conqueror first made the New Forest his royal hunting ground in about 1079.  He called it Nova Foresta.
• King William II, the site of whose death is commemorated by the Rufus Stone at Canterton near Stoney Cross, was known as Rufus because of his ruddy complexion.
• Alice Hargreaves (nee Liddell), the inspiration for Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), is buried at Lyndhurst Church of St Michael and All Angels.
• The village of Sway is the setting for Captain Marryat’s well-known book The Children of the New Forest (1847).
• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is buried in the churchyard at Minstead. His novel The White Company (1891) features the New Forest.
• The artist Augustus John lived and died at Fordingbridge.
• The landmark 218ft Sway Tower is a folly built by Judge Andrew Peterson in 1879. It has 13 floors, 11 rooms and 390 steps. It took a workforce of 40 men and cost around £30,000. It was one of the first buildings to be made predominantly of concrete.
• The New Forest had a famous snakecatcher, Henry ‘Brusher’ Mills (1840-1905). He was born at Emery Down and lived in a charcoal burner’s makeshift hut. In his time he caught approximately 30,000 snakes and 3,500 adders. Some he sold to zoos; others he made into an ointment which he claimed as a cure for rheumatism. The pub in which he used to drink at Brockenhurst is today called The Snakecatcher.
• Bolton’s Bench in Lyndhurst commemorates one of the Dukes of Bolton who was Lord Warden of the New Forest in the 18th century.

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