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Whenever the British use the word 'new', it's a good idea to pause, take a breath. Everything might not be as it seems. With a history as long as Britain's, words are frequently far removed from strict dictionary definition. Consider, for instance, London's Law Courts a little north of the Strand and Fleet Street, and particularly New Court. 'New'? Well, not quite. Seventeenth-century, actually. And then there's New College, Oxford, founded in 1386. Or New Romney, one of five Cinque Ports that date back to the days of Magna Carta. And then, of course, there's the daddy – or rather the great-great-etc-etc-daddy – of them all: the New Forest. With its prehistoric burial mounds, barrows and encampments, its feudal laws and time-trapped settlements, the New Forest is anything but.

If the word 'new' is something of a misnomer, so too is 'forest'. There's more moorland and open heath here than woodland, more gorse and heather than noble oak. Like all the great forests of England, the New Forest was long ago plundered to provide fuel and building materials for the people who lived there, as well as grazing for sheep and cattle. This clearing of trees and opening up of the land also created a perfect environment for hunting. Which was why, in 1079, William the Conqueror appropriated the New Forest as a royal hunting preserve, its moors and marshes, heath and woodland conveniently close to his court in Winchester.

In order to protect his new acquisition, William imposed punitive restrictions on the New Forest's inhabitants, their rights deemed secondary to the game that he hunted – a man could have his eyes put out for disturbing a royal deer and have a hand cut off for poaching (try drawing a bow with just the one). Nearly a thousand years later, the laws governing the Forest's supervision may be less draconian but little else has changed. Relatively untouched since those far-off Norman times, more than a hundred-and-forty square miles of this medieval landscape remain intact, a large part of it still the property of the Crown. Administered by the Forestry Commission, the National Trust and the local Verderers' Court (whose agents – or Agisters – still patrol on horseback), the New Forest is the largest area of uncultivated land outside the Scottish Highlands scented, when the wind is a southerly, with the sharp, salty tang of the English Channel.

You know you've arrived in the New Forest, pitched in southern England between Bournemouth and Southampton, when your car rumbles over the cattle grids that mark its boundary, or 'perambulation' to give it its proper, feudal name. What's astonishing is how immediately and completely the countryside changes. From the sprawling conurbations of Southampton and Bournemouth, the landscape opens up, stretches away, a shifting quilt of crisp, sunshine yellow gorse and dusky, purple heather, ranging heath and shadowy, sun-slanting woodland.

Now a National Park, the New Forest's extraordinarily undeveloped, undisturbed natural beauty and wealth of wildlife has made it a major tourist draw, attracting between seven and eight million visitors a year. Which means, if you choose a summer weekend to drive around the Forest's 90,000 acres (with its statutory 40mph speed limit on unfenced roads), you may be in for trouble. All it takes is a few New Forest ponies to graze too near the roadside and traffic builds up into a long line of exhaust fumes and temper.

Which is why the canny New Forest visitor parks as soon as possible. Because it's when you leave your car and the main thoroughfares that you really know you've arrived. With its lacework of bridle-paths, woodland trails (more than 150 miles of car-free tracks) and campsites, even the remotest parts of the Forest become accessible, easily and pleasurably reached on foot, on horseback or by bike. And once away from the tourist tracks, you'll find an astonishing range of flora and fauna you'd stand no chance of seeing from a car, a wealth of wildlife drawn here as development beyond the New Forest erodes remaining natural habitats. The wolves and wild boar that William would have encountered may have gone, but tread carefully and you'll close on grazing deer – five separate species including the secretive sika deer; catch rare sand lizards and adders soaking up the morning sun; witness the flighting hunt of hobbies and harriers; and hear the rare, chit-chatty call of warblers, woodlarks, stonechats and nightjars. And if you visit the Forest in autumn, remember to keep your eyes on the ground, for woodland glades provide a perfect environment for luscious mushrooms like the fat-stemmed – and sought-after – cep.

There are many fine walks throughout the New Forest and Visitor Centres at Lymington, Lyndhurst and Ringwood will recommend any number of possible routes. Among my favourites are Shatterford and Bishop's Dyke, an easy four-kilometre hike through heath and woodland that's popular with birdwatchers; Roydon Woods with its stiles and kissing gates; the watermeadows of Fordingbridge, the trout-stocked streams of Ober Water, the oakwoods of Exbury and the coastal paths of Lepe. There's also the classic route along the banks of the River Beaulieu to Buckler's Hard where, from Elizabethan times onwards, some of the greatest British men o' war were built using native New Forest oak. The largest house in this tiny, red-brick hamlet was once the home of Henry Adams, a master shipwright who built the fleet that Nelson commanded at Trafalgar.

In the New Forest it's sometimes difficult to decide whether it's heath or history that's the more seductive. Certainly, there's no shortage of contenders in the New Forest history stakes. At Beaulieu, ancestral home of the Montagus since the reign of Charles II, are the haunting ruins of a Cistercian monastery built by King John in 1204; and in Lyndhurst, 'capital' of the New Forest, is the seventeenth-century Queen's House where the Verderers, one of the official bodies responsible for the Forest's upkeep, still hold court. Among the New Forest's most celebrated residents are Florence Nightingale who grew up in the village of Wellow; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, who lived in Minstead; and Alice Hargreaves who came to live in the Forest in the late 1880s. As a little girl in Oxford she was the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

How fitting, then, that she should live out her days among the wonders of the New Forest.

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Recommended hotels in The New Forest

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United Kingdom, South West England, The New Forest

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