New Forest National Park protects the New Forest, one of the largest remaining tracts of unenclosed pasture, heathland and forest in southern England, spanning southwest Hampshire and southeast Wiltshire. The forest was proclaimed a royal hunting forest by William the Conqueror in the eleventh century and is recorded in the Domesday Book, giving it one of the longest continuously documented histories of any protected landscape in England. Its ancient grazing commons, still worked today by local commoners with rights to pasture ponies, cattle and pigs, make it a landscape whose ecological character comes directly from centuries of continued human use rather than from exclusion of it.
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