Ponies grazing at latchmore bottom new forest

The Latchmore Brook is a stream in the

New Forest The New Forest is one of the largest remaining tracts of unenclosed pasture land, heathland and forest in Southern England, covering southwest Hampshire and southeast Wiltshire. It was proclaimed a royal forest by William the Conqueror, featu ...

Hampshire Hampshire (, ; abbreviated to Hants.) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Berkshire to the north, Surrey and West Sussex to the east, the Isle of Wight across the Solent to the south, ...

England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...

. It rises from the elevated gravel plateaus in the north of the Forest, north of Fritham, and drains into the River Avon north of Ibsley. The name was first recorded in 1391 as ''Lechemere'' and means either leech pool, or boggy pool. The stream's catchment is open

heathland A heath () is a shrubland habitat found mainly on free-draining infertile, acidic soils and is characterised by open, low-growing woody vegetation. Moorland is generally related to high-ground heaths with—especially in Great Britain—a coole ...

deciduous In the fields of horticulture and botany, the term deciduous () means "falling off at maturity" and "tending to fall off", in reference to trees and shrubs that seasonally shed Leaf, leaves, usually in the autumn; to the shedding of petals, aft ...

woodland A woodland () is, in the broad sense, land covered with woody plants (trees and shrubs), or in a narrow sense, synonymous with wood (or in the U.S., the '' plurale tantum'' woods), a low-density forest forming open habitats with plenty of sunli ...

silvicultural Silviculture is the practice of controlling the growth, composition/structure, as well as quality of forests to meet values and needs, specifically timber production. The name comes from the Latin ('forest') and ('growing'). The study of forests ...

inclosures and, in its lower reaches, small scale pastoral farmland; as such there are no consistent sources of pollution and the stream's course and character has largely remained free from artificial modification. Historically, the greatest human impact on the brook was connected to the Schultze Gunpowder Factory which was established in the 1860s at Eyeworth Lodge near Fritham. The factory required large volumes of water and this demand was met by damming the brook to create a reservoir (which still survives as Eyeworth Pond). The problem of sulphuric and nitric acid discharges contaminating the river, killing fish, only ended when the factory closed in the 1920s.

References

New Forest Rivers of Hampshire {{Hampshire-geo-stub