A church, a chapelry of Minstead, certainly stood here in the
thirteenth century, but was destroyed, and a Georgian building erected
--in its turn to give place to the church we see.
Lyndhurst, though almost without interest itself, is undoubtedly the
best centre for exploring the Forest, or, at any rate, perhaps the most
beautiful and certainly the most interesting parts of it. So by many a
byway I went northward to Minstead in Malwood, where I found a most
curious church, rather indeed a house than a church, with dormer
windows in the roof, an enormous three-decker pulpit within, galleries,
and two great pews, one with a fireplace, and I know not what other
quaint rubbish of the eighteenth century. All this I found enchanting,
and more especially because the nave and chancel seemed to me to be
originally of the thirteenth century, and certainly the font is Norman.
But the church with its eighteenth-century tower is perhaps the most
amazing conglomeration of the work of all periods since the twelfth
century to be found in southern England.
From Minstead I went on up the Bartley water to Stone Cross, nearly
four hundred feet over the Forest, from which by good fortune I saw the
mighty Abbey of Romsey in the valley of the Test, where I intended to
sleep.
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