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The village of BEAULIEU (whose name originates from the French meaning "Beautiful Place", but is pronounced "Bewley"), in the southeast corner of the New Forest, was the site of one of England's most influential monasteries, a Cistercian house founded in 1204 by King John - in remorse, it is said, for ordering a group of supplicating Cistercian monks to be trampled to death. Built using stone ferried from Caen and Quarr on the Isle of Wight, the abbey managed a self-sufficient estate of ten thousand acres and became a famous sanctuary, offering shelter to Queen Margaret of Anjou among many others. The abbey was dismantled soon after the Dissolution, and its refectory now forms the parish church, which, like everything else in Beaulieu, has been subsumed by the Montagu family who have owned a large chunk of the New Forest since one of Charles II's illegitimate progeny was created duke of the estate. The estate has been transformed with a prodigious commercial vigour into Beaulieu (daily: May-Sept 10am-6pm; Oct-April 10am-5pm; GBP9.95), a tourist complex comprising Palace House , the attractive if unexceptional family home, the abbey and the main attraction, Lord Montagu's National Motor Museum . An undersized monorail and an old London bus ease the ten-minute walk between the entry point and Palace House. The house, formerly the abbey's gatehouse, contains masses of Montagu-related memorabilia while the undercroft of the adjacent abbey houses an exhibition depicting medieval monastic life. Inside the celebrated Motor Museum, a collection of 250 cars and motorcycles includes a Formula One McLaren, spindly antiques and recent classics, as well as a couple of svelte land-speed racers, including the record-breaking Bluebird . The entertaining "Wheels", a dizzying ride-through display, takes you on a trip through the history of motoring. If Beaulieu amply deserves its name, Buckler's Hard , a couple of miles downstream on the River Beaulieu (daily: Easter-Sept 10am-6pm; Oct-Easter 11am-4pm; GBP3.50), has an even more wonderful setting. It doesn't look much like a shipyard now, but from Elizabethan times onwards dozens of men o' war were assembled here from giant New Forest oaks. Several of Nelson's ships, including HMS Agamemnon , were launched here, to be towed carefully by rowing boats past the sandbanks and across the Solent to Portsmouth. The largest house in this hamlet of shipwrights' cottages, which forms part of the Montagu estate, belonged to Henry Adams, the master builder responsible for most of the Trafalgar fleet; it's now an upmarket hotel and restaurant. At the top of the village, the Maritime Museum traces the history of the great ships.
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