The New Forest, on the south coast of England, is one of the few areas in Britain that has kept its original medieval character. Now a National Park, it is so heavily wooded that it is possible to walk for hours on end without breaking cover. Neil Ansell’s most recent book, The Last Wilderness, was about the north-west Highlands of Scotland. A former journalist, he is at his most content when alone with birds and his own thoughts. While the New Forest is hardly a wilderness – on one walk he encounters an ice-cream van, on another an outing of Jewish schoolboys – in certain ways it is the epitome of English wildness, the sort our ancestors would have found familiar. Created when William the Conqueror turned it into the first royal deer park, it is both rugged and tame. Its heath and forest stretch for miles, and while its main occupants are ponies, cattle, deer and wildlife, it is marked by human activity, in recent times and long ago.