| Bucklers Hard |
| Near to Beaulieu can be found
another attraction that is owned by Lord Montague, and that is village
of Bucklers Hard, the unusual thing about this village is that you have
to pay to visit it!! The reason being is that it is now classed as a
maritime Museum though it was first build as a port town by the second
Duke of Montague in the 1720s. There is only the one "street" which
consists of two rows of terraced Georgian cottages facing each across a
wide grassy area that takes you down to the shores of the Beaulieu
River. Shipbuilding here was started in the 1740s under Henry Adams and his family and this carried on till it dissolved in 1811, and many of the great ships of England were built here of New Forest Oak including Horatio Nelson's HMS Agamemnon. HMS Euryalus was built by the Adams yard at Bucklers Hard, Hampshire and launched in 1803. As a frigate she was designed to cruise and patrol rather than take part in a fleet action, when she would not be able to withstand the heavier gunfire of the much larger ships, and at Trafalgar acted as one of the close blockade on Cadiz. The maritime museum began in the 19th century and some of the cottage and inn interiors have been reconstructed so that the visitor can enter into them and see what life was like, even dummys have been placed inside and one of the old houses has been changed to a chapel and is open to the public. Away from the museum and on the road to Lymington is St Leonard's Grange once one of the great barns that was owned by the monks at Beaulieu Abbey, it has huge walls and stands near to a 17th century farmhouse and a tiny chapel. Carry on south down the narrow lanes and some old isolated coastal farmhouses and cottages can be seen at Sowley, thre is also a pond here which was part of the iron industry which thrived here during the 1800s.
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