ABSTRACT
The New Forest, like almost everywhere else in England, is a landscape of artifice, and in this particular area the artifice of ‘natural countryside’ is being deployed in increasingly urgent debates over the future of rural landscapes. The New Forest is an area of approximately 375 square kilometres of mixed woodland and heathland in south-west Hampshire flanked by Southampton and Bournemouth. C.R. Tubbs characterizes many conflicts in the New Forest as a response to the slowly growing importance of silviculture. Crown interest in the New Forest turned increasingly away from deer to its timber and underwood resources and by 1810 professional silviculturalists operating out of a new Office of Woods were in place. Pictures, maps and brochures are three important ways in which the landscape of the New Forest is constructed for and by many visitors. J. Burgess has shown how forests and woodland are experienced as landscapes of fear by many women.
