I was researching the campsite we’re at in the New Forest and stumbled across a couple of reviews which initially made me think, “Good grief, what sort of place have we booked?”
Then I kept reading and gradually realised the reviewers were essentially furious about having encountered countryside.
One reviewer wrote:
“The biggest drawback, however, is the animal excrement. The site allows farm animals to roam freely - which means the ground is littered with droppings everywhere you walk.”
Another added:
“Bizarrely the entire camping area is freely accessed by New Forest ponies/horses.”
Bizarrely.
Like arriving in Venice and lodging a complaint about all the canals.
About halfway through reading these reviews I suddenly realised the core issue here was not poor campsite management. It was shock that horses, when left outdoors in fields for extended periods, behave in a recognisably horse-like manner.
There is something wonderfully modern about visiting one of the oldest surviving common grazing landscapes in Europe and reacting as though the presence of animals is some sort of catastrophic management failure.
“Is this even legal?” asks the reviewer.
Yes. Fairly certain the ponies have more historical rights there than most of the visitors.
I also began forming a mental picture of the reviewers. The sort of people who probably live in a city suburb with a motorhome or caravan squeezed onto a tiny resin driveway between the recycling bins and the neighbour’s fence, then venture into the “real countryside” twice a year only to discover, with mounting horror, that the countryside contains actual countryside.
The New Forest is not Centre Parcs. It is not one of those immaculate continental campsites where every hedge is clipped to within a millimetre of its life and the shower block resembles a private hospital. It is an ancient landscape full of semi-wild ponies, cattle, donkeys and pigs wandering about with the quiet confidence of creatures that know they were there first.
And, inevitably, they leave evidence.
You cannot really demand authenticity and then become upset that authenticity smells faintly of horse.
I particularly enjoyed the complaint that the area was “scrubby and overgrazed”.
Again, yes.
That is why it looks like that. If you remove the grazing animals, the landscape changes completely. The reviewer seems to have expected some sort of lush cinematic wilderness and instead discovered an actual bit of southern England with livestock in it.
The complaint about “a definite whiff of horse urine in the air” after rain was also rather splendid. Well yes. Wet horses and damp earth do tend to smell somewhat... horse-adjacent once the rain starts. That is not really a campsite defect so much as biology carrying on in the usual way.
Then there was the criticism of the shower block being “shipping container variety”.
Oddly, that made me feel slightly patriotic because British campsites often do have that faintly improvised atmosphere. The showers usually look as though they were originally intended for either roadworks or military exercises, yet somehow function perfectly adequately while a retired bloke in sandals nearby explains to somebody the exact noseweight limit of his Bailey caravan and whether diesel heaters flatten leisure batteries overnight.
What really struck me, though, was the underlying contradiction. People increasingly say they want nature, authenticity and rustic experiences, but only if nature has first been carefully pressure washed and deodorised.
They want wild ponies, but apparently operating under strict waste-management protocols.
Personally, I now rather like the sound of the place. If a pony wanders past the motorhome looking faintly judgemental while I’m drinking tea outside, I shall consider the holiday a success.
Though admittedly I reserve the right to revisit that position after stepping barefoot into something warm on the way to the showers.
No comments:
Post a Comment