This year and for the first time, the Beaulieu Motor Museum has joined in the Christmas fun with an illuminated Christmas trail. The Christmas trail at Beaulieu is located at the Motor Museum in Hampshire's New Forest, and it features a mile-long illuminated trail with immersive installations. I visited the trail on Sunday evening, and shown below are just some of the illuminations. The Motor Museum's gift shop and restaurant also stayed open for the evening, and a fun fair with food trucks and rides was also present. Overall, the trail was not too busy and certainly not as busy as I expected it would be.
Many areas, such as trees, were illuminated on the trail, and snowflakes lit up the trail in some areas. The buildings also made a canvas for illuminations with patterns and snowflakes projected onto them. The trail also featured a Tunnel of Light with over 100,000 lights, sparkling colour-changing LEDs in synchronisation with Christmas hymns, a wishing tree, Alice in Wonderland illuminated tea party, additional light tunnels with Christmas songs playing, a tunnel of icicle lights, and illuminated illustrations set to the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas". Throughout the trail, filtered-spotlights adding colour to statues, trees, and architecture at Beaulieu and stars and fairy lights hung or were displayed along the path. Many stops along the trail provided great photograph opportunities.
One of the best displays was the Scented Fire Garden with lit ruins of Beaulieu Abbey, which projected a pattern onto the side of the abbey. This included the Fire Garden Cloisters, designed with flames and a Christmas-tree shaped structure with flames as the centrepiece. The arches and brickwork of the medieval abbey were lit up.
Santa Claus also made an appearance with one of his helpers with a short performance.
Half the way through the trail was a marshmallow pit with fires to enjoy toasted marshmallows over. The marshmallows could be purchased and toasted separately or with a unique take on the s'mores with ginger snap biscuits, a slice of dark chocolate and your choice of flavoured marshmallow.
Probably my favourite illiminations of the evening were the projections onto Palace House with colour-changing and illustrations of lights, all set to classical music. The sequence was a few minutes long and then repeated.
The finale of the trail included several small pine trees and a larger pine tree. These pine trees were sequenced to Christmas music with the colours of the lights changing and flickering along with the music to create patterns and different colours. This was a repeating sequence and was colourful.
This is the first year that Beaulieu have put on a Christmas trail, and I think they did a good job of creating interesting and immersive areas. This is certainly much better than the "Christmas at Kew" (Illuminated Kew Gardens at Christmas) illuminated trail that I visited in 2014, which only included a few illuminations with a wide area of dark trails without anything interesting in between. It was a fun evening out.
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