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.