Gritnam and the Great Woods Of Lyndhurst.

We had another early morning walk today. It was a lovely fresh sunny morning and still warm enough to walk in shirt sleeves.
We decided to follow a walk from the book "The New Forest Companion by Anne-Marie Edwards. I have a note in the book that I walked here on 21/1/1989 . So it has been a long time since I was here and memory would not help me.
We started from the car park at Swan Green and crossed the Cricket Pitch looking for a track through the trees. Well we found a nicce broad track and started up the hill until we met the cross track. We then spent about 15 minutes looking for the track on the left,we eventually decided it was the one straight ahead! We were right and we continued down a slope (seemed quite a gentle slope) We crossed a couple of muddy streams and walked around the edge of Allum House. This was once the home of the Fenwick family wealthy bussiness men who moved to the New Forest in the mid nineteenth century. Here they had a secluded home in the middle of the forest. The railway made travel into London easier for bussiness and at the weekends they could return home for hunting and shooting activities.
After crossing the A35 we entered gritnam woods and eventually arrived at the little hamlet of Gritnam. There were some lovely cottages here, you could walk out your font door and go straight in to the forest.Here we lost the way again and had to backtrack until we stumbled on the out skirts of the little Village of Bank. This is a very pretty village with some thatched cottages scattered among more modern dwellings.
We missed the track down to the A35 and we had to walk a few hundred yards along this busy road before crossing it we found another gate into the forest . Soon we found our original path down the slope. This time we had to go up the slope and it was a lot steeeper and longer than it had seemed on the way down.
However it was not long before we were back at Swan Green, having spent about two and a half hours walking.