The area around Lymington is the part of the deal you are really paying for. Draw a circle a kilometre wide in any direction and you find about eighteen green spaces, the nearest of them under two hundred metres from the average front door. The forest sits to the north and the Solent to the south, so the town is squeezed, in the best possible way, between a national park and the sea. Water of some kind is under four hundred metres away on average, and there is a great deal of it: more than thirty separate blue spaces within that same kilometre. This is a town wearing its surroundings as its main feature.
Take the green first, because there is an unusual amount of it and it is unusually close. Eighteen-odd green spaces within a kilometre and an average walk of under two hundred metres to reach one is not the normal ration for an English town. Northward the ground rises into the open forest, the same landscape the village of Boldre sits inside, which puts heath, woodland and grazing commons a short drive away rather than a day trip. The formal nature designations do not overlap the town itself, and they do not need to when the national park is the back garden and the coast is the front.
The character comes from that squeeze between forest and water. To the south and west the land runs down through Pennington and out toward the low, marshy coast at Keyhaven, the old salt-working shore that gave the town its first trade. Along that stretch sit the coastal villages, Milford on Sea among them, where the mainland looks across at the Isle of Wight. Inland the settlements thin into proper forest hamlets, Pilley, Sway, Walhampton, each small and quiet and tied to the land around it, with the odd landmark like Pylewell Park or the tower at Sway breaking the tree line. It is a well-off, well-kept, low-density corner of Hampshire, and the surrounding parishes trade town amenities for space and green without ever sitting far from either.
What you do not get out here is bustle or anonymity. This is a landscape of villages around a market town, not a city fringe, so the bargain is a slower pace and a smaller crowd in exchange for the scenery. For the buyer who wants the coast and the countryside doing most of the work of daily life, that is the entire point rather than a compromise.
On its surroundings, Lymington earns a full five out of five, and for once the top mark is uncomplicated. Forest on one side, sea on the other, green space almost everywhere you turn, and villages between them that most of the country would happily swap postcodes for. Whatever else you weigh about the town, the setting is not the part you will end up regretting.