Burley, Hampshire

Burley is located towards the western edge of the New Forest, south-east of the town of Ringwood. The village is fairly scattered, and apart from the village centre, there is Burley Street to the north; Bisterne Close to the east; and the Mill Lawn area to the north-east. Burley has a post office, newsagents, butcher's shop, and village stores, as well as tea rooms, a Hippy/festival clothing shop, antique shops, art galleries and gift shops, pubs and a large Cycle Shop and Cycle Hire centre. Burley is home to a football club and a cricket club. Burley Golf Club can be found to the southeast of the village. The village is surrounded by the open heathland of the New Forest, Burley is twinned with Beurlay, Charente-Maritime, France. Burley Fire Station is thought to be the only fire station in the country with a cattle grid at the entrance. ==History==

People have lived in the Burley area since prehistoric times. At least 23 Bronze Age barrows are known in the Burley area. The site of an Iron Age hillfort can be seen just to the west of the village at Castle Hill. There is evidence of Saxon occupation as the name Burley is composed of two Saxon words 'burgh', which means fortified palace, and 'leah', which means an open meadow or clearing in a wood. Burley is not specifically mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086, but the entry for nearby Ringwood may well refer to Burley when it mentions lands in the forest with "14 villagers and 6 smallholders with 7 ploughs; a mill at 30d; and woodland at 189 pigs from pasturage." Burley was part of the royal lands of the New Forest. By the beginning of the 13th century the family of de Burley was firmly established here. The mill is commemorated in names of Mill Lawn and Mill Lawn Brook, The station buildings still stand, and are now tea rooms. Arthur Clough (son of Arthur Hugh Clough) and his wife Eleanor Freshfield built Castletop House on Castle Hill Lane in 1898: Eleanor's father was President of the Royal Geographic Society and brought back many exotic plants from his travels which were planted at Castletop. Burley has a long connection with witches; in the late 1950s, Sybil Leek, a self-styled white witch, lived in the village. Some of the gift shops in Burley now sell witch-related gifts and ornaments. ==The Bisterne Dragon==

Burley is notable in English folklore for the supposed location of a dragon's lair at Burley Beacon, just outside the village. There are several versions of the tale, one being that the creature "flew" every morning to Bisterne, where it would be supplied with milk. To kill the dragon, a valiant knight (usually named Berkeley) built a hide, and with two dogs lay in wait. The creature came as usual one morning for its milk, and when the hut door was opened the dogs attacked it, and while thus engaged the knight took the dragon by surprise, the dogs dying in the affray. ==References==