Milford on Sea, often hyphenated, is a large village or small town and a civil parish on the Hampshire coast. The parish had a population of 4,660 at the 2011 census and is centred about south of Lymington. Tourism and businesses for quite prosperous retirees as well as the care sector make up large parts of its economy. Businesses include restaurants, cafés, tea rooms, small shops, garden centres, pubs and camping/lodge/caravan parks, bed-and-breakfasts and a few luxury hotels. Shops cluster on its small high street, which fronts a village green. The western cliffs are accessed by flights of steps. In common with the flatter coast by the more commercial and eastern part of Milford, they have car parks with some facilities, which, along with many apartment blocks and houses – many in attractive modern designs – have close views of The Needles, which are the main, large chalk rocks immediately next to the Isle of Wight. Its western coast is a large bank of shingle below green cliffs. Bathing, when seas are calm, is favourable as tides are relatively muted for the coast at this point and thin sandbanks are nearby at lower water. The eastern part of the place culminates in Hurst Castle, Hurst Point which is a 16th-century defensive fort with later modifications, which has a museum, visitor tour rides and amenities for tourists. Much of the land of the parish has been recognised and protected from dense habitation by a surrounding green belt buffer zone of land, recognising its heath soil associated with the New Forest, its biodiverse wet woodland in the west (a local nature reserve which hosts badgers, fish and many bird species) and various water type marshes including an RSPB reserve in the east. History Milford began as a Saxon settlement, and the name simply means "mill ford". At the time of the Domesday Book of 1086 there were two separate estates in Milford, one held by Aelfric Small, and the other land with no villeins or cottars noted held by Wulfgar. At a later date three separate manors were evolved from these estates and were eventually known by the names of Milford Montagu, Milford Barnes, and Milford Baddesley. The manor of Milford Montagu, which was held of the lords of Christchurch, seems to have originated in an estate held by William Spileman at his death in 1291. In the late 14th century it