I hadn’t been back to the New Forest in years. I’d come with my son for the weekend before his work experience placement started, but there was another reason for returning. This was a landscape where important things had happened to me, and where people who had once been crucial to my life had left their mark.
As we pulled into the hotel car park just outside Minstead, I realised that my son would see most of this landscape simply as background. He didn’t know that his own existence was tied to it: that his mother and I had lived nearby, cycled here, broken up here and, years later, found our way back together.
The drive south had taken most of Saturday. We stopped in Romsey and grabbed some lunch in the middle of the Beggars Fair, then wandered along the River Test past the mill and the abbey. It was the same town where, more than twenty years earlier, I’d lived briefly as part of my decade working at IBM, climbed with friends, mountain biked after work. It was where my sons mother and I had first lived together. Now I was walking those same streets with our sixteen year old son. We ate salads in King John’s House gardens while music drifted through the town, then continued our drive in the heat wave towards our hotel.
That evening was warm and still, and I suggested to my son that we go for a walk. There was something I wanted to show him. So we set out towards the Rufus Stone. The route passes beneath the dual carriageway through a concrete underpass; the sort of place you could drive over a hundred times without ever knowing it was there. But I had travelled through it many times in another version of my life. I had mountain biked here with my sons mother, when we were younger and she was working at the Minstead Trust. Later I had run these trails with Gail, who came briefly into my life after Caroline and I separated.
Gail had shown me something about discipline and consistency I probably wasn’t ready to understand at the time. She didn’t try to change me; she simply lived differently and I noticed. Nearly two decades later, some of that example remains with me in the form of less alcohol, more running and an enduring fascination with making deliberate use of the first part of the day.
Walking through the underpass with my son felt more significant than I had expected. I wasn’t really showing him a piece of concrete beneath a road so much as trying to explain that a life accumulates in layers. Places become associated with people, and people leave influences behind, sometimes long after they’ve disappeared from your everyday life. Someone can matter for only a relatively short period and, twenty years later, you can still recognise traces of them in the way you live.
My son couldn’t see any of that when he looked at the path ahead of us, but I could. Eventually we reached the Rufus Stone, marking the place where King William II was killed by an arrow while hunting in 1100. We had brought a flask and made a simple meal beside the path. There’s something I’ve always liked about that small independence, being able to stop somewhere and make food from a rucksack rather than having to find a café. After eating, we continued towards Minstead, passing the Minstead Trust where his mother had worked before reaching the churchyard and the grave of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. There was an odd symmetry to it all: a medieval king, a Victorian writer, the place where my childrens’ mother had worked and paths I’d travelled with people from several different chapters of my life, now being walked with my son.
We returned through the gathering dusk. The following morning we were going somewhere built around a similar question: what survives after people and their worlds have gone.
We reached Portsmouth Historic Dockyard as it opened on Sunday morning, planning to see as much as possible before closing time. It quickly became obvious that Portsmouth is not somewhere you simply “do” in a day.
HMS Victory was surrounded by the machinery of its continuing conservation: scaffolding, supports, visible evidence of the effort required to keep an eighteenth century wooden warship alive. The restoration work didn’t diminish the experience; it had the opposite effect. The scaffolding emphasised that Victory is not simply an object placed in a museum and left alone; it’s something fragile that successive generations have decided is worth preserving.
The Mary Rose affected me differently. I had been there almost eighteen years earlier, when the surviving hull was still undergoing conservation and visitors watched timbers being sprayed with water soluble wax. You could see the ship, but not its world. Returning now was astonishing. A vast museum has been constructed around the surviving section, allowing visitors to move alongside it at different levels while objects recovered from corresponding areas are displayed opposite. The ship on one side and the lives lived inside it on the other.
The Mary Rose sank in 1545 while confronting a French fleet in the Solent. The suddenness of the loss created an extraordinary archaeological record. What fascinated me most was not the grand military equipment but the ordinary possessions: combs, shoes, bowls, tools and other things whose owners could never have imagined being examined five centuries later. The crew’s skeletons reveal another kind of history. Disease and nutritional deficiencies left traces, but so did occupation. The archers particularly interested me because years of drawing powerful longbows had altered their bodies, leaving evidence of their work in their bones. Here was a man’s working life recorded in a shoulder joint and a spine.
Standing there with my son, only a day before he was due to begin his own first workplace experience, I couldn’t help thinking about the different ways work shapes us.
One of the most memorable artefacts belonged not to a sailor but to Hatch, the ship’s dog, whose skeleton was discovered close to the carpenter’s cabin. Somehow his presence makes the world of the Mary Rose immediately more familiar. A Tudor warship might feel remote when described in terms of weapons and naval warfare, but it’s easier to bridge five centuries when you imagine somebody calling a dog, feeding him scraps or complaining that he was somewhere he shouldn’t have been.
We initially skipped the Dive the Mary Rose 4D experience because of the queue, but returned later. By then we had seen many of the bowls, tools, weapons, shoes and skeletons recovered from the seabed, which made the story of the divers and archaeologists who excavated and raised the wreck far more powerful. The museum was really telling two histories at once: the Tudor story of the ship and its crew, and the modern story of the people determined enough to recover it.
From the Mary Rose we travelled forward more than two centuries to HMS Victory. The experience is completely different. The Mary Rose is archaeological, a world reconstructed from what survived, while Victory feels immediate because you can walk its decks, duck beneath its beams and stand beside its cannon. You get a physical sense of hundreds of men living and working inside an astonishingly confined wooden machine.
After moving quickly through HMS M.33, we reached HMS Warrior. Walking from the Mary Rose to Victory and then to Warrior was almost like walking through a history of technological change happening in fast-forward. The Mary Rose belonged to a Tudor world of timber, sails and cannon. Victory represented the extraordinary refinement of the wooden sailing warship. But barely half a century after Trafalgar, Warrior appeared with an iron hull, steam power and rifled guns. Standing aboard her, you could see how quickly a technology that had dominated warfare for centuries was approaching obsolescence.
By mid afternoon the heat was beginning to take its toll. Boathouse 4 provided a welcome change of pace. There were smaller restored vessels, workshops and volunteers who seemed delighted whenever somebody wanted to know what they were working on. One craft in particular caught our attention because it had been powered by three Spitfire aircraft engines. Yet the people restoring the vessels were almost more interesting than the machines themselves. History does not preserve itself. Someone has to decide that it matters enough to raise the Mary Rose, conserve Victory or spend hours restoring an old motor launch. What survives is often simply what somebody chooses not to let disappear.
Towards the end of the afternoon we reached the National Museum of the Royal Navy. By then we were both flagging after hours on our feet in exceptional heat. Then my son stopped in front of an enormous sail laid out before us. It was one of Victory’s surviving original sails. It had caught the wind and formed part of a working warship, but was now so fragile that its continued existence depended on careful conservation. Most of the day’s visitors had gone by then and for a while it seemed almost to be just my son and me quietly looking at it. After a day filled with enormous ships and thousands of objects, there was something fitting about one of the final things we stopped for being a piece of cloth.
We walked out as the dockyard was closing, found fish and chips by the harbour and sat beside the water watching the boats. What stayed with me, though, wasn’t the number of things we had managed to see. It was watching my son read. Again and again I found him standing in front of information panels, absorbed in some detail that had caught his attention. His interest in these ships had partly begun with a television series, but now he was standing inside them.
The following morning I would drive my son to his uncle’s solicitors’ office in Poole and leave him there for his first week of work experience. His own working life is still some distance ahead but perhaps that was part of why the weekend affected me.
When children are little, much of parenting involves showing them the world: taking them to castles and museums, along woodland paths, aboard old ships, explaining what they’re looking at and deciding where to go next. As they get older, that gradually changes. You realise you’re no longer simply introducing them to your world, but watching as they develop their own interests and make their own connections.
Perhaps that was what returning to the New Forest had really shown me. Places remain, while some people stay and others pass briefly through your life but leave something behind. Technologies change, relationships change and children grow up. The past doesn’t simply disappear. It becomes part of whatever we build next.