Authors: Anne and John Coles
Date: 12th May 2017
(Click on the images to zoom in)
We have studied several Beaulieu houses these past few years but we have really enjoyed looking at Gins. We hope you will enjoy hearing the story too.
This is the menu:
- First, the monastic period, from the 13th to the 16th centuries. There is no documentary evidence whatsoever. But we still think we can suggest what went on here.
- Part two is the next hundred years or so and is called “Gins, the smart place to live”. You’ll see why.
- Part three is our evidence for dating the first house built here. We think that can be done to within ten years.
- Part four is the story of Gins as a working farm, a story three hundred years long.
- When we get to the 20th century we have someone here tonight who actually lived in Gins Old Farmhouse and two people who visited it very often.
- Then we shall look at the splendid row in 1961 over the proposal to build a clubhouse here for Royal Southampton Yacht Club.
Our story has monks, gentlemen, gentlewomen, farmers male and female, dead bodies and guns.
The constant feature of Gins throughout the story is its location - magnificent, beautiful, remote, dangerous at times. The geography is fundamental.
THE GEOGRAPHY OF GINNS
The physical environment has imposed continuity on this low-lying part of Beaulieu that has traversed the centuries. 
Geology: pink is for Permian!As you approached the house tonight you were driving on the slightly elevated gravels of the Permian geological formation which extends from St. Leonard’s as a promontory into the sea, providing a firm surface amid the mud flats for a harbour. This feature explains much of the history of Gins. It is a strategic location. Until the shingle spit at Needs Ore was formed, largely by the Great Storm of 1703, Gins would have been the first sheltered landing inside the Beaulieu River. The river’s channel was almost certainly deeper in the past, probably by about a metre, and therefore fully navigable for most ships, even at low tide. And the river, today used for recreation, was for most of Gins’ history an important transport route.
Embankments 1867Incursions by the sea were a constant threat to vulnerable farmland. Bunds and embankments like these were needed to protect it. Dating is imprecise but Bartlett believes that much of the work on the embankments was done by the Cistercian monks during their land reclamations. Today the Solent coast is considerably eroded and still eroding. But on the west bank of the Beaulieu River we find extensive marshland, salt flats, and reclaimed pasture, with several small jetties. The salt marsh provided good seasonal grazing. Cattle were important both for beef and dairy production. The reclaimed land was fine for cultivation, for cereals, hay and fodder crops, while the low lying flats with their embankments also offered opportunities for salt production, a major activity here for well over a thousand years. While the main area of salt production was from Milford to Lymington, salterns occur on both sides of the Beaulieu River. The saltern at Deep Marsh, just south of here, is thought to be early mediaeval in origin, while that at Gins may be of similar age and was still in use into the nineteenth century. Traces of it can be seen across the road from the house. 
Gins Saltern 1783: M.Mackenzie’s chart
This part of the Beaulieu River was also geographically ideal for smuggling. A panel in Buckler’s Hard Museum describes it well.
We shall focus on the house but we need to bear in mind the constant background of the river, the mud-flats, the marsh, the sea and the continuous effort needed to protect the farmland and the livelihoods of those who worked it. And the weather: the storms. Widnell, the former estate agent, found in early nineteenth century parish records four cases of bodies of strangers being found dead on the shore, at Park, St Leonards and one near Ginns.