Later the church was lengthened westward, and the
tower built at the eastern end of the Norman aisle. In that aisle there
is a tablet to William Gilpin, the author of "Forest Scenery," who was
vicar of Boldre for a generation, dying in 1804 aged eighty years. He
is buried in the churchyard.
Boldre is certainly a place to linger in, a place that one is sorry to
leave, but I could not stay, being intent on Lymington. Therefore I
went down through the oak woods, over Boldre Bridge, to find the high
road, which presently brought me past St Austin's once belonging to
the Priory of Christchurch, under Buckland Rings to the very ancient
borough of Lymington, with its charming old ivy-clad church tower at
the end of the High Street. The church, in so far as it is old of the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, has little to boast of, for it has
been quite horribly restored. In the long street of Lymington I slept.
There seemed to be nothing to keep me in Lymington, and therefore,
early upon the following morning, I set out for Milford, five miles
away by the sea, and there I wonderfully saw the Needles and the great
Island and found another Norman church, Norman that is to say in its
foundations.
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