A royal tryst in the woods may have given birth to a British institution right on our doorstep.
Walk into almost any town or village in the land and you will almost certainly find a pub called The White Hart.
It is one of the most enduring and reassuring features of British pub life; a regular on our high streets and country roads.
But for centuries, drinkers in Ringwood have proudly - and some might say brazenly - made the bold claim over their pints that the very first White Hart in all of England was based in our market town.
The legend is firmly rooted in New Forest folklore.
It goes that King Henry VII was out on a hunting trip deep in the ancient woodland when he and his hounds cornered a majestic, exceedingly rare white stag.
Rather than see the hunt end in the customary bloodshed, the King was so taken with the creature's otherworldly beauty that he ordered it be allowed to live.
He is said to have placed a gold collar or chain around its neck and leashed it, leading the magnificent beast in triumph out of the trees and into Ringwood.
According to legend, the party paused to enjoy their strange catch at an important local inn, where the landlord marked the bizarre but glorious royal visit by renaming his house on the spot as The White Hart and by choosing the collared stag as his sign.
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And so a national naming custom was born, all in a single historic afternoon in Hampshire ⎯ or so it is claimed.
Historians, of course, might adopt a more sober note over a half-pint of mild.
The white hart was the personal heraldic badge of King Richard II, who decreed in the mid-fourteenth century that every pub must exhibit a sign by which it could be identified by the official ale tasters.
Not surprisingly, landlords keen to gain royal approval painted the King’s white hart on their swinging board.
But why let the dusty annals of heraldry ruin a perfectly good barstool yarn? For the people of Ringwood, the tale of the golden-collared stag is more than just a quirky piece of trivia - it’s is a point of civic pride
