A day in port: Winchester and the New Forest, and back to your ship

Winchester is the closest of the places worth a day out from Southampton, and the one people most often overlook because it is close. It was the seat of the kings of Wessex and a centre of royal power in Anglo-Saxon England, and it kept that weight long after the court moved to London. Alfred the Great stands in bronze at the bottom of the High Street, put there by the Victorians, looking up a street that has been the main street of the city for a thousand years.

The cathedral was begun in 1079 and consecrated in 1093, and it has one of the longest naves of any gothic cathedral in Europe — the length is the thing you notice first, walking in at the west end. Jane Austen is buried in the north aisle, having died in a house in College Street in 1817. The library holds the Winchester Bible, a twelfth-century illuminated manuscript, and the building owes its continued existence to William Walker, a diver who spent five years from 1906 working underwater in the flooded foundations, shoring them up bag by bag.

The rest of the city is small and walkable. The Great Hall, all that survives of the castle, holds the round table top that hung there through the Middle Ages and was painted in Tudor colours for Henry VIII. Winchester College was founded in 1382 and still runs. The High Street keeps its fifteenth-century Buttercross, and a footpath along the water meadows leads out to the twelfth-century Hospital of St Cross, which still hands out the Wayfarer’s Dole to anyone who asks.

The New Forest starts about eight miles west of Southampton and runs for some 220 square miles of heath, bog, ancient woodland and open lawn. William the Conqueror set it aside as a royal hunting ground around 1079 — new, then — and it became a National Park in 2005. Very little about the way it is managed has changed in the meantime, which is what makes it unlike anywhere else you can reach from the docks in half an hour.

The animals are the thing people remember. Ponies, cattle and donkeys wander freely across the heath, the lawns and frequently the roads, and they are not wild: they belong to commoners who hold ancient rights of pasture, and they are rounded up each autumn in drifts organised by the agisters. They have right of way, which is why nobody drives quickly here and why you will find a pony standing in the middle of a village street as though it owns it.

There is no single sight to tick off, and that is rather the point of the stop. Lyndhurst is the small capital of the Forest and the usual place to set down; Brockenhurst has ponies on the green and a ford through the middle of it; Beaulieu has the abbey ruins and the National Motor Museum, and Bucklers Hard on the river beyond it is an eighteenth-century shipbuilding village of two brick terraces and a slipway. Any of them makes a stop; all of them is a different day.