One Day in Brockenhurst

Summer finally arrived in the south of England yesterday and, on a lovely sunny day, Phillip and I headed for the New Forest and Hampshire County Show in Brockenhurst. He'd aquired a membership pass for the show society and I had a guest pass, both of wich entitled us to use the members' facilities at the show-ground and the comfort of the grand-stands to watch events. The occasion was like a scaled-up version of Australia's small town country shows that we are used to, as this and the next posting will show. Since the population in the vicinity of Brockenhurst may be a couple of million people, plus south coast holiday makers, the show was a major draw-card and the show-ground was almost impossibly crowded. This patronage probably enabled some of the more spectacular events we saw. This post just says something general about the show; the next post will deal with horseyculture.

I said it was crowded, and the first picture shows one of the innumerable 'streets' lined with merchants selling all kinds of goods. The second, taken from the relative calm of the members' area, looks towards the crowds outside of the display enclosure.

Like most shows, there were lots of things for families and children to do or watch, and the next picture sees a member of stunt riding duo barely holding on to his machine high above the ground. By the way, the bike is not square on to the landing ramp either, but he landed safely!

Then there were machinery displays like the one pictured. Much of the equipment was, however, smaller scale than what we are used to, and we saw little in the way of grain harvesting implements.

Like all country shows, there was an emphasis on livestock of just about every kind: cattle, sheep, goats, alpacas, chooks, pigs, and even an intresting display of honey bees. Many of the cattle and sheep breeds were new to me like the British White cattle pictured here and the countless different breeds of sheep. I show the Boreray and Portland sheep on the next two pictures, but there were different breeds from just about every island in the Hebrides! The Borerays were billed as rarer than the Giant Panda, with only 2-300 in existence, while the Portland hail from Dorset. The range of sheep made the Australian countryside look boring.

AS