I just read an amusing blog-post by Joe Winchester, a developer at IBM Hursley.

At the weekend, we went for a walk in the New Forest. Despite living fairly nearby, we have mostly only driven through the New Forest to get to other places, like Hurst Castle.

According to 100 Walks in Hampshire & Isle of Wight, the Naked Man is “the stark remnant of an oak tree struck by lightning many years ago. As befits its sinister origins, it was also used as a gibbet tree.” The gibbet was used to hang highwaymen and smugglers – probably the same ones that used the track alongside, which, according to my book, “has a long history of usage, most famously as a smugglers’ path for contraband landed at Lymington.”

Disappointingly, the Naked Man looks like neither a gibbet nor even a naked man:

It looks, as it is, like the stump of a dead oak tree that has other plants growing on it. The fencing around it seems a little pretentious but we wouldn’t have found it otherwise.