Lyndhurst Through The Beer Glass Pt 1 - The Mailman’s Arms

The New Forest town of Lyndhurst has a few claims to fame, for example...

Alice...

It is the resting place of Mrs Reginald Hargreaves, the woman/girl who Lewis Carroll based his ‘Alice’ on, in 'Alice in Wonderland'...

It has one of the worst (and probably most unsolvable), traffic bottlenecks in the New Forest...even in 1950, John Betjeman picked up on the effect of early traffic when featuring Lyndhurst in the second of his Coast and Country radio programmes on the West of England Home Service (4th August 1950). For example:
‘But on a warm night you can smell it [the New Forest] between the wafts of petrol and scent that linger on tarmac....’
and,
‘But I can imagine that before motors came into existence, before the ‘caffs’ and the ‘kiosks’ and the guest houses..., before the petrol pumps, wires, poles and signs that follow the motor car - before all these things, Lyndhurst, lost in the forest and its nearest railway station three miles away, must have been a paradise to stay in.’

Tesla - quality traffic in Lyndhurst

...and, for a small country town, rather remarkably, it has seven pubs, in the locality.

Perhaps not so bad a place then, for a Saturday afternoon beer walk on a pleasant autumn day...accompanied by my son, Martin.

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” (Alice In Wonderland)

So we did, and the starting point, at the bottom of Lyndhurst’s High Street, was the Greene King’s The Mailman’s Arms...

Mailmans Arms - ‘green’ King

This is a lovely little oldey worldey, flower bedecked kind of pub, which, according to the sign on the wall, once upon at time sold Burton’s finest beers...

...but not any more...

Resigned to the prospect of a Greene King IPA, it was a relief to see that the house beer was in fact Bolton’s Bench Forest Bitter, named after the local landmark, commemorating an 18th century New Forest Master Keeper, the Duke of Bolton...

Not IPA (possibly)...

...while it has to be said that the pint looked remarkably like a GK IPA in it’s appropriately branded glass - it was in fact a good pint, which just shows that re-naming a 3.9% IPA, can make all the difference.

I’d like to tell you more about the pub's quaint interior but, as it was a nice day, we decided to sit outside in the front beer garden...

Beer garden.... 

Though Lyndhurst suffers greatly from the excesses of the motor car, ironically, right next door to the pub is the Ferrari and Maserati dealer, ensuring that the bankers and stockbrokers returning to their weekend homes in the New Forest, have suitably powerful vehicles to cruise around the 40mph speed limited Forest roads.  

So at least they are ‘quality’ motor cars, if you can afford one...

....with views of stunning supercars...

Coincidentally, while we sat there drinking our beers and pondering what it must be like to drive a quarter of a million pounds worth of Italian super car, the Glory Boys (Mods for Life) turned up, as if to remind us that not all classic Italian motoring needs to cost an arm and a leg...

Affordable Italian motoring...(not the black one)

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'
'That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat. (Alice in Wonderland)

So we set off up the High Street to the next pub...