The Colonel, however, with subtler distinctions on his mind, was not sorry as they came along the platform to see another top-hatted figure, with a rich brown beard, waiting by the entrance of the first-class carriage. For though his fellow landowner, the lord of the great Beaulieu estate, was only a little over half his age, he was the son of a duke, which was no small thing to be in Victorian England.

'My dear Colonel.' The aristocrat raised his hat and even gave Pride half a nod.

'My dear Lord Henry.'

'We are here, I believe,' Lord Henry smiled at them both, 'to save the New Forest.'

In the year 1851, the fifteenth of the reign of Queen Victoria, the British Parliament had passed an Act that was to mark the greatest change in the New Forest since the days of William the Conqueror.

They decided to kill all the deer.

Nobody knew exactly how many deer there were: surely seven thousand; perhaps more than ten. Red and fallow, stags and hinds, bucks and does, calves and fawns - they were all to die. The Deer Removal Act was the title by which this measure was to be known.

Of course, it was centuries since, as a deer farm, the New Forest had had any economic justification. The deer culled each year went to the ancient officers, or to landowners whose property lay in the area. Indeed, it was calculated that each deer killed actually cost the Crown the astonishing sum of a hundred pounds! The Forest was an anachronism, its offices were sinecures, its lovely deer served no purpose. But that was not why they were all to die.

They were to die to make way for more trees.

Ever since the first, late medieval coppices, the Crown had taken an interest in its Forest trees. When the merry monarch Charles II had begun his plantations, he had started a more organized approach to the question of timber; but the first time that Parliament had really addressed the subject was an Act of 1698, when it was decided to set up inclosures for growing timber. Stock - deer, cattle and ponies - would be fenced out until the saplings were too well grown to be eaten by them. Then the inclosure would be opened up again for the stock to graze the undergrowth, and a new inclosure made elsewhere. But although some inclosures of oak and beech had been made, the business had never been followed through. Indeed, most of the oaks felled for the naval ships at Buckler's Hard came from the open Forest, not from plantations. The old medieval woods and heaths stayed very much as they had always been.