Start from 42 curated places around New Forest, GB, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Hartnett Holder & Co at Lime Wood
Angela Hartnett and Luke Holder's all-day Italian dining room at the Lime Wood country house hotel, looking out over the lawns toward the open forest. Sharing antipasti, hand-rolled pasta and wood-fired secondi land on long tables in a room dressed like a posh farmhouse kitchen.
The Pig
The original Pig hotel and restaurant set in a Georgian forest lodge between Brockenhurst and Beaulieu, with a 25-mile menu built around the kitchen garden, local foragers and Solent fishermen. The greenhouse-style dining room and rustic-luxe Piggy Bits bar feel like the prototype the whole British country-hotel scene is now copying.
Trails & outdoors
Bolderwood Deer Sanctuary
A 0.5-mile loop from the Bolderwood car park out to a raised wooden viewing platform looking over the deer lawn, where fallow and roe deer are regularly fed by the rangers. The wider Jubilee Grove trail adds a second mile through some of the New Forest's oldest ornamental conifers.
Knightwood Oak
An easy 10-minute stroll from the dedicated car park off the A35 to the Queen of the Forest, a pollarded oak more than 500 years old and 7m round. The short loop continues through Mark Ash Wood, one of the finest stretches of ancient beech and oak in the park.
Things to do
New Forest Wildlife Park
A 25-acre woodland park outside Ashurst focused on native and European species - otters, lynx, wildcats, wolves, bison and a busy collection of British owls. Keeper talks run through the day and the otter feeds are the standout fixture.
Longdown Activity Farm
A working family farm near Ashurst geared completely for younger children, with bottle-feeding of kid goats, calves and lambs, daily ferret racing, trampoline barns and a soft-play loft. The seasonal lambing and chick-hatching weeks are the busiest fixtures.
Landmarks & sights
Beaulieu National Motor Museum
Lord Montagu's sprawling estate combines one of the world's great car collections with the 13th-century Palace House and abbey ruins on the Beaulieu River. The motor museum holds more than 250 vehicles from Edwardian tourers to Bond cars, with a monorail and replica 1930s garage scattered across the grounds.
Buckler's Hard
An 18th-century shipbuilding village frozen in time on the Beaulieu River, where three of Nelson's ships including HMS Agamemnon were built. Two grass-banked terraces of brick cottages slope down to the slipway, with a maritime museum, restored shipwright's cottage and pleasant riverside walk to the Master Builder's pub.