My heart is in the New Forest.

Where is yours?

The train eased out of Waterloo Station on Saturday morning.

The grey pillars of the city soon made way for the emerald hills and fields of Surrey, and beyond: heathland, woods, and the ocean.

When we glided into Brockenhurst station in Hampshire, barely two hours later, any sense of busyness had long since evaporated. A quick brunch in a local cafe, and a few minutes later, we were welcomed into the thousand-year-old arms of the New Forest.

The campsite was a forty-minute hike away, across saturated bogs and beneath the shadows of ancient woodland.

Within the first few minutes we were greeted by New Forest ponies, grazing on the heath, unperturbed by our presence. A bullfinch flashed bright red on the bank of a bubbling stream. Stonechats flitted between clumps of yellow flowering gorse, chat-chat-chatting across the heath. Somewhere in the woods, a cuckoo called, the first of the season.

The New Forest, named because it was new for William the Conqueror when he planted it as a dedicated hunting ground a thousand years ago, is an eclectic mix of precious habitats. It is a patchwork of ancient and ornamental woodland, open heathland, rivers, valley mires, and a coastline of mudflats and saltmarshes.

Most noticeable to me as I hiked was the waterlogged soil. The forest seemed saturated, as if the recent heavy rain had filled it like a sponge that could no longer take any more water. Streams had burst their banks and flooded paths, and previous travellers had dragged logs across the wettest and muddiest parts.

But water is a vital part of life in the New Forest. It is home to 75% of all the mires in north-western Europe, the accumulation of peat becoming an important natural carbon sink. Its trees tower over a network of rivers and streams threading through a verdant carpet of moss and lichen. The forest was wet, fresh, and smelled of earth and rot, life and death.

The campsite was a field, thin with amenities but rich in character. We weren’t the only people who decided to get away for the long weekend - caravans and luxurious tents bursting with accoutrements packed every pitch.

We explored. The woodlark called to us, but evaded us. A skylark whirled in the clouds above us, distracting us from its nest on the ground. A meadow pipit flitted between the lonely trees out on the mires.

On Sunday we walked. The miles rose and fell beneath us, and we seemed to be the only people on Earth as the other visitors remained in their deck chairs with cold cans in easy reach.

The green canopy of the New Forest smothered us, and we hopped over streams and floods that had long since washed away any waypoints. Ponies cried out. Between the trees we saw them gallop, towards something or away from something it was impossible to tell, but they seemed almost mythical in this ancient place that had been their home for a thousand years, this ancient place in which we were only guests.

In a field approaching a village, two adult deer kept a close eye on their suckling young, still nervous on their new legs. We watched them for a long time, and without my camera I felt no pressure to try and capture it: just the freedom to sit and be.

Across a bridge, an eerie sight. A graveyard of dead oak trees, bone white and leafless, skeletal frames stark against a blue sky. Egrets, herons and mallards seemed to thrive in the flooded waters, and a persistent woodpecker drilled the deadwood nearby. Whether this was a part of nature’s course or a failed forestry plantation I’m not sure, but it was ethereal and beautiful all the same.

28 or so kilometres later, we found ourselves back at the campsite, taking the weight off our feet. Sleep came quickly, as heavy as the thick fog that descended on the tent with the night.

But I awoke a couple of hours past midnight, to the sound of something grazing noisily close by. I looked out, but saw nothing: just the thick silhouettes of the other tents, haunting the fog.

At sunrise we stepped out to walk again, to find the campsite filled with dozens of deer. They gathered around tents, grazing for crumbs, otherworldly and silent in the morning mist. They kept a wary eye on us as we left, before flocking and turning as one to disappear into the woods as other humans began to wake up.

We ate our breakfast in the woods listening to the dawn chorus. A tapestry of robins and blackcaps and thrushes and wood larks, competing and complementing and harmonising even as rain began to fall.

The town of Lymington on the coast was a short train journey away. Purple heath flashed past the windows and the trees of the New Forest were soon replaced by the bright white masts of yachts in the quay, and the cry of birds gave way to the cry of excited children crabbing in the harbour.

The authority that manages the New Forest is keen to stress it is not a natural environment. It has been carefully looked after, monitored, and used by humans for hundreds of years. But it is a haven for wildlife and people alike, a coming together of humans and nature in a symbiotic relationship that just seems to work. The Forest is a way of life, with wild ponies left to amble through the streets and generations of artists inspired by the textures of woods and the mires.

The people of the forest know their wellbeing depends on the wellbeing of the woods, and vice versa. It is not immune to the threats that face Britain’s other green spaces - urbanisation, pollution, climate change and pests encroach with increasing intensity each year. But all the more reason to champion it. To fight for its beauty. For the multitude of benefits it brings to us and insects and mammals and birds and plants.

Because when we returned to London that evening our hearts were full, our spirits as new as this ancient forest nestled on the coast of a rapidly changing country.