Wanderers in the New Forest

Product Information

Read on to find out more about this interesting witch shop and Sybil Leek. We’ll also share some other secrets and facts about Burley Village that you might not know yet. Soon after that radio talk, I heard Lenn Witt approaching where I was working, scything grass. The forester’s footsteps were known to both my children and me, the heavy, dragging boots. Just seven minutes in he had a shot on target when he shifted on to his left foot and his effort was tipped over the bar by Sa. Lenn Witt sometimes had Gypsies helping in his fields, and we would see them at various tasks there, and often hear their singing rising to our cottage. And if there were women workers, then there was usually a touch of the most favored Gypsy colours to be seen, the red and the orange of a head-scarf or blouse to brighten the drab, ordinary country clothes now worn by most of the New Forest Gypsies. They do much work in fruit-gathering, especially on the many local strawberry farms, and some of the families still travel to work many counties away in the fruit and hop orchards. At the time of his death Robert Cooper had on him a piece of cake, given him by a lady in a nearby house, which he was keeping as always for the children, who were his delight.

Just two minutes later, he was involved again, going down in the area after a tussle with Toti, though he was booked for simulation. Eiza had had her own experience of forest treasure. She related this to me with her usual childlike truthfulness and simplicity. Other Coopers far across the forest at Thorney Hill, spoke about Eiza's find to Jenny Vize: aged about seventy-five to eighty, they remembered it well. Her family had been employed in the turnip fields near Broome, hoeing turnips. She was aged nearly six then and had left work to play away with her brother several years older than herself. They met a lady ''fair but strange seeming', and Eiza had then pointed to her head to indicate that all had not been normal about that lady met with near Broome when turnip hoeing. The lady furthermore had been strangely dressed, 'in ol' fashun way, wearin' a big straw 'at, such as the gawje gentry sometimes wear, an' 'er face perculer white beneath it, an' her clothes peculiar wi' a glisten upon 'em never seen afore. But she was gentle lookin' but rather 'azy an' a bit frantic, me brother an' me weren't at all trashed (frightened) of 'er.' Then it was that the Gypsies saw our Afghan hound as she ran at the child’s side, as always busy protecting him, and they declared, enraptured, that they had never known before that such a beautiful dog existed in the world. A Mrs. Elizabeth Cooper, Gypsy, of Bromley, Kent, sent a well-written letter to the News Chronicle, protesting that in three successive cases of child-stealing recently, the Gypsies had been made suspect. That it would be interesting to know when the last case of child-stealing against a Gypsy was proven and why no apology was ever made to the maligned Gypsies when each time the guilty party was found to be a non-Gypsy!

Fun fact: Did you know ponies have lived in the New Forest for over 2,000 years?! More New Forest Attractions Near The Tall Trees Trail

Granny Cooper had been on one of her rounds with her basket, selling things, bartering and gathering, also advising on herbal cures for which she was much esteemed throughout Wessex. Then at Bishopstone, near Salisbury, she was asked to read the hands of a ploughman and his wife. She foretold that the man would soon be so rich he would have no need to plough another furrow. Johnson finished from the tightest of angles - and through the legs of Jose Sa - after getting on the end of Danilo's ball. The success of Jenny Vize as a Gypsy artist was very exciting for me; I think that she is one more person who possesses Gypsy blood, for she gathers wild things from the forest with my own keenness, feeling that same urgent need to search and gather from the surrounding countryside. I know she hungers for sunlight and has great difficulty in staying indoors at all to do housework. Wilton has become the accepted burial place for the local forest Gypsies, ever since a Gypsy boy killed in an accident was buried there, and the mourning Gypsies were very kindly treated by the Church and the local people, so it is told. But there are Gypsy graves also at Wood Green, another Gypsy stronghold, part of which was 'and still is in places 'squatters' land, and which once had a name for being 'a terrible wild place', with frequent bloody fights between poachers and Gypsies and gamekeepers and Gypsies. Two crosses of stone, pressed flat into the forest loam, mark the graves of two Gypsies killed in a fight there, and many more had secret burials. I also took away a box of pansy roots, and I massed them around the base of a white lilac tree, and what pleasure those Gypsy pansies gave to me all the time until I left Abbots Well, with their beautiful and brilliant colours and their almost perpetual flowering!I told them that I had had fifteen of the kind once, and that Tullipan was the descendant of a strain of Afghan hounds which I had raised a while ago when I was little beyond school age, a strain of hounds which never knew disease. The more settled and house-dwelling that the English Gypsies became, the more they seemed to feel the handicap of being a racial minority. Their feelings might have been unjustified on some counts, but with the bans in force against the pulling-in of their vans, found almost throughout the British Isles, and many other anti-Gypsy or general anti-nomad laws, it was to be expected that the present generations of those people should seek to conceal their origin and often end all Gypsy association.

Meanwhile kings and artists and poets have loved the Gypsies and often been influenced by them. Augustus John declared to me that it is obvious that Shakespeare fell in love with a Gypsy woman and that the 'dark lady' of his Sonnets was a Gypsy. The old Gypsy concluded our conversation by dancing some steps for me, inspired then by Christopher's guitar playing and he singing Green Broom, a song always close to the Romanies.

Walk 6: Beachernwood and the Tall Trees

The singing of the English Gypsy men is usually a disappointment, especially when contrasted to the romantic beauty of Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish and many French Gypsy singers. I found the English mostly raucous and bawdy and I never wanted to hear much of it. When the travellers were ready to drive away, I asked them from where they came. And the woman replied:

If only the Gypsies themselves appreciated what it means to be a Romany. Why, it means usually physical beauty and virility, special gifts of music, dancing and singing, of healing and prophecy, a way with animals and a kinship with Nature that few other races, apart from the Bedouin Arabs, can ever possess. One day the Gypsy race, despite or perhaps because of persecution, will return to its former power and have again its kings and dukes and princes, its wonderful dogs and falcons and horses.It’s in this shop that you can find the following story displayed in the window… Why is it so witchy in Burley?