Creeping Through the Forest

It's that time again - Monthly Movie time.  Once again, this is also, effectively, a holiday film, but as the footage was shot in September, I thought I'd count it as part of the 'Monthly Movie' project.  This was shot at the Highland Water enclosure near Emery Down.  The path actually does a complete circle and it is possible to access the other side of the ford seen in the August Monthly Movie by taking one of the many paths which branch off of it.  However, I didn't get to that path.  In fact, I didn't complete the circuit of the main path.  I became so spooked as I walked around the enclosure that I abandoned the walk half way (hence the abrupt ending to the film) and hot footed it back to my car. 

As you can see, it was broad daylight, and the only other living things I encountered were two ponies, but there was something about the atmosphere of those woods which really disturbed me as I walked through them.  It didn't help that only a couple of days before I shot this, there had been a murder in another part of the New Forest, (the scene of which, coincidentally, I had unknowingly driven past several hours after the incident), and, as I rounded the bend in the path after the ponies, I noticed, deep in the trees, a tent of some kind.  Clearly, someone was living rough in the enclosure.  Bearing in mind that at this point no arrests had been made in the murder case, I became somewhat uneasy.  My sense of uneasiness grew as, after I passed the tent, I became convinced that I could hear someone or something moving parallel to me in the tees, although I couldn't see anything.  When I couldn't hear the distant crackling of fallen twigs and branches breaking as something moved over them, there was just an eerie silence.  At which point my nerve broke and I hurried back to the car (as I was the only one parked in the car park, I had assumed I was alone there), and drove a few miles down the road, to an enclosure with more people in evidence.

Not surprisingly, the film reflects my sense of unease, with some dark and foreboding music (courtesy of Kevin MacCleod), heightening the sense of tension as I creep, hesitantly, through the forest.