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The village of BEAULIEU (whose name originates from the French
meaning "Beautiful Place", but is pronounced "Bewley"), in the southeast
corner of the New Forest, was the site of one of England's most
influential monasteries, a Cistercian house founded in 1204 by King John
- in remorse, it is said, for ordering a group of supplicating
Cistercian monks to be trampled to death. Built using stone ferried from
Caen and Quarr on the Isle of Wight, the abbey managed a self-sufficient
estate of ten thousand acres and became a famous sanctuary, offering
shelter to Queen Margaret of Anjou among many others. The abbey was
dismantled soon after the Dissolution, and its refectory now forms the
parish church, which, like everything else in Beaulieu, has been
subsumed by the Montagu family who have owned a large chunk of the New
Forest since one of Charles II's illegitimate progeny was created duke
of the estate.
The estate has been transformed with a prodigious commercial vigour into
Beaulieu (daily: May-Sept 10am-6pm; Oct-April 10am-5pm; £9.95), a
tourist complex comprising Palace House , the attractive if
unexceptional family home, the abbey and the main attraction, Lord
Montagu's National Motor Museum . An undersized monorail and an old
London bus ease the ten-minute walk between the entry point and Palace
House. The house, formerly the abbey's gatehouse, contains masses of
Montagu-related memorabilia while the undercroft of the adjacent abbey
houses an exhibition depicting medieval monastic life. Inside the
celebrated Motor Museum, a collection of 250 cars and motorcycles
includes a Formula One McLaren, spindly antiques and recent classics, as
well as a couple of svelte land-speed racers, including the record-breaking
Bluebird . The entertaining "Wheels", a dizzying ride-through display,
takes you on a trip through the history of motoring.
If Beaulieu amply deserves its name, Buckler's Hard , a couple of miles
downstream on the River Beaulieu (daily: Easter-Sept 10am-6pm; Oct-Easter
11am-4pm; £3.50), has an even more wonderful setting. It doesn't look
much like a shipyard now, but from Elizabethan times onwards dozens of
men o' war were assembled here from giant New Forest oaks. Several of
Nelson's ships, including HMS Agamemnon , were launched here, to be
towed carefully by rowing boats past the sandbanks and across the Solent
to Portsmouth. The largest house in this hamlet of shipwrights' cottages,
which forms part of the Montagu estate, belonged to Henry Adams, the
master builder responsible for most of the Trafalgar fleet; it's now an
upmarket hotel and restaurant. At the top of the village, the Maritime
Museum traces the history of the great ships.
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