This past weekend, in the midst of essays and presentations and colds and moving house and just generally going a bit mad, I visited a quaint village: Lyndhurst. Lyndhurst is a tiny village in the county of Dorset, and happens to be in the middle of New Forest, an English national park full of wild ponies. Some may say it’s a wonderland (sorry). It also happens to have been the home of the woman who inspired Alice in Wonderland.
“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
The little village is full of references to Alice – including the Mad Hatter tea room which we peered inside of at all the Alice in Wonderland paraphernalia.
The village itself is quaint and full of tudor and brick houses, and a high street lined with tea rooms, clock towers, and wandering British tourists.
“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
One special place is the grave yard, up on the hill behind the church at the top of the high street.
“Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Tucked away behind the church is the grave of Alice Hargreaves (maiden name Liddell) – the lady who, as a child rowing in Oxford with Lewis Carroll, inspired him to pen the classic story Alice in Wonderland.
“Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
Following the high street down in the other direction leads directly into New Forest, which feels a bit like Wonderland, as it’s full of wild ponies and donkeys. We saw a fair few ponies nudging people, stealing food, climbing on blankets, interrupting cricket games, etc… there are so many that people almost treat them like “pests”! Giant, lovely, hilarious pests who want to steal your sandwich…
Back on the high street there are tons of tea rooms to choose for lunch. We went with the unusual Tea Total tearoom, a more eastern inspired tea room (that hosts gluten free scones as well as a huge range of imported teas, especially matcha tea!).
^^ Matcha lemonade…matcha has 3x the antioxidants as normal green tea!
“Alice:How long is forever? White Rabbit: Sometimes, just one second.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
It was a wonder-ful day out 😉
Sarah xx
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6 Responses
Alice in Wonderland was one of my favorite books growing up and I even got to study it in college! I would love to go here. Now I want to re-read it after seeing these pictures and reading those quotes again. And I’m glad that you got to go out despite being super busy — sometimes that’s when we need a day like this the most.
This college lit class sounds amazing… Is it the same one where you read Harry Potter???
awesome!
Thanks for reading 🙂
Sorry to mention it but Lyndhurst is actually in Hampshire.
That is actually hilarious. This post is so old! My boyfriend from Dorset drove us here and when I wrote this, I assumed it was also in Dorset and clearly never did the research. I will update this post accordingly, clearly it’s long overdue!