Farther away to the westward lies Sowley Pond, called in the Abbey Charters Colgrimesmore, and Frieswater, covering some ninety acres, formerly the boundary of the abbey estate, and used by the monks as a preserve for their fish. Here once were iron-works, whose blast-furnaces were heated with wood and charcoal from the Forest. The iron-stone was brought from Hengistbury Head and the Hordle Cliffs, and after being melted was shaped by the tilt-hammers, and finally sent off inland to Reading, or shipped at Pitt's Deep. But like all the other ferraria of Sussex and Hampshire, these too have long since been stopped, driven out of the field by the Staffordshire iron-works. Nothing now remains to tell their former importance but a few mounds and the village Forge-Hammer Inn, and a country proverb, "There will be rain when Sowley hammer is heard," whose meaning is fast being lost.
Returning, however, to Beaulieu, let us once more look at the old abbey and the ruins of the cloisters, and try to imagine for ourselves the time when, secluded from the world, in the midst of the New Forest, the monks from Citeaux prayed and worked, clad in their coarse white woollen robes, and slept, according to their vow, on pallets of straw, giving shelter to the fugitive, and food to the hungry.[1] It is only by seeing some such grey ruins as these, still breathing of a long past religion, placed amongst the solitude of their own green meadows and woods, by the silent lapse of some stream flowing and ebbing with every tide, that we can at all understand the meaning of a life of contemplation, and its true value. Along these cloisters
- ↑ Even Layton saw their kindness, and pleaded for the poor wretches whom they had protected. Letter regarding Beaulieu Sanctuary from Layton to Cromwell, Ellis's Letters, third series, vol. iii. pp. 72, 73.
