Deep in the woods, there are strange stirrings. One local is threatening to slash the tyres of restaurateur and mushroom lover Antonio Carluccio – his crime was to bring busloads of paying cep hunters from London. Another tells stories of night puffball raids. A third man likens finding a chanterelle to having an orgasm. Yet another won’t tell his wife where he goes when he disappears picking.

There are a lot of fungi fetishists about today.

The New Forest is the home of ceps, chanterelles, pieds de mouton, chicken of the woods and puffballs. All this high emotion, these murderous and lustful thoughts, are engendered by a passion for mushroom picking. Welcome to the intriguing world of strange fruiting bodies.

At Le Poussin restaurant in Brockenhurst, where New Forest donkeys wait outside the bakery opposite stealing the bread of unsuspecting customers, we enjoyed a delicious lunch of local produce, two courses for £10. Proprietor Alex Aitken – he of the night puffball raids – has kept prices low by gathering much free food himself. Mushroom featured heavily. After lunch Alex junior, his nine-year old son, took us into the forest to look for edible fungi – after considering whether or not to blindfold us. The woods were emerald green with moss and golden leaves on the ground. Suddenly there was a clearing, with a mare and nervy foal warming in the sunlight. Conditions of humidity and rotting vegetation were ideal and we found hundreds of chanterelles, sprinkled like gold among the poisonous mushrooms. Mushrooms years away from the white jobs you buy in the supermarket.

We were staying at the luxurious Chewton Glen where it was easy to stop thinking about fungi for a minute. Antique riding boots, leather-bound books and old tennis racquets were strewn round the house, and boleti in the larder. Our bedroom was big enough to ballroom-dance in, and you can swim in the bath while dreaming of gill smells, blunt-edged wrinkles, spore colours and the stinkhorn (Phallus impudicus), which has such a risque shape that Charles Darwin’s daughter burned any she found.

Mushroom guru Roger Phillips sometimes guides hotel guests round the forest, showing them how not to pick the deadly species that kill you after about half an hour. Hunters take wicker baskets, never using a plastic bag, because fungi soon sweat and collapse.

We lunched at the hotel on wild mushrooms in filo cases followed by haddock gateau. Then we indulged our obsession and found some giant puffball scattered like polystyrene balls round the grounds. Nearby we also found fly agaric, the deadly red and white mushrooms popular in fairy tales. Stone Age spearheads and Celtic pottery have been discovered on the nearby cliffs, but we unearthed some field mushrooms.

At Rocher’s, a seaside restaurant and the home of more mushroom fetishists, proprietor Alain Rocher won’t tell his wife where he forages for fungi. They talk glowingly of Mrs T, the local top mushroomer who, it is rumoured, sells to Harrods and once took a taxi from the New Forest to London with her fungi – and still made a profit.

There is, of course, more to do in this corner of the New Forest. The riding, for example, is magnificent and hiring horses from the East Street Stables, we rode through heather and streams, passing pink cottages in the middle of nowhere. The light and cloud formations are eye-catching. But next day we were back searching for mushrooms from the vantage point of the car (keeping an eye out for oncoming donkeys) and the following night stayed at Gordleton Mill Hotel, with its outstanding Restaurant Provence. The chef is dishy Jean Christophe Novelli and his famous creation is Pied de Cochon (braised pig’s trotter sometimes filled with, you guessed it, wild mushrooms) but mycologists should feed on the scallops with freshly pickled trompettes de la mort (horn of plenty mushrooms).

Gordleton Mill has slightly dodgy Gallic decor, but is idyllically positioned in a garden that sprouts field mushrooms. There is also a fridge to fit a juggernaut, stuffed with pieds de mouton and horn of plenty. Novelli scores his mushrooms from a Polish dealer.

People talk of murdering for less. Or just serving the type of mushroom that sends you straight to hospital, the death cap.

How: Until the end of this month Chewton Glen (0425 275341) offers dinner, bed and continental breakfast for two people from £255 a night (minimum stay two nights) including service and VAT.