Bolton's Bench
By Grace Parker
It’s a dragon story.
There was a dragon that was terrorising a small hamlet in the New Forest. A hamlet is smaller than a village. The dragon was called Biston. It must have been a small dragon to be terrorising such a small place. Until one day, an old man said he had had enough. He took his two dogs and swore to take down the dragon. All he had was a handmade bow. He ambushes the dragon outside the village of Lyndhurst as it feeds. In many stories, dragons are obsessed with drinking milk. They don’t eat cows or people — they go for the milk. So the man and the two dogs ambush the dragon, and they kill it with the yew bow. The dragon falls, forming the hill known as Bolton’s Bench. Its body becomes the hill.
But the old man, although he won, lost his two dogs in the fight. The dogs die. Consumed with grief, the man wanders the forest for a month or two. In some versions, the death of the dogs is not mentioned, but he still wanders, either from grief, exhaustion after the fight, or shock at what he has done — that he destroyed such a great creature. In some tellings, he regrets it. He wanders the woods for a month, then finally returns to the hill, climbs to the top, and dies of a broken heart. His yew bow is beside him. The remains of the bow sink into the soil, and from it grows a tree — another yew tree. At the top of the hill. This is close to what Bolton’s Bench looks like: a small but tall hill in a very flat plain, with one large tree on top. It is now a popular place for dog walkers.
