All's Weald That Ends Weald

For centuries, those fleeing the City life have lived the high life in the High Weald’s blissful seclusion.

- Penny Churchill

  

SPREAD across the four counties of Kent, East Sussex, West Sussex and Surrey, the High Weald aONB—the fourth largest in England and Wales— is a mosaic of small farms and woodlands, historic parks, sunken lanes and ancient ridge-top villages in a landscape originally created by pioneering farmers of the late medieval period. In the late 1400s, the rapid growth of the iron industry and the development of crafts such as weaving and tanning made the High Weald one of the wealthiest areas in England. However, by the 18th and 19th centuries, these activities had moved to more accessible locations, leaving smallscale, largely unprofitable farming as the mainstay of the rural economy.

On the other hand, the heavily wooded hills and relative inaccessibility of the High Weald, which give the area its unique sense of remoteness and seclusion, have long appealed to prosperous city-dwellers in search of a country retreat. From the 14th century onwards, Kent was the first port of call, due not only to its proximity to London, but also to its particular form of land tenure, which enabled land to be bought and sold with relative ease. The advent of the railways in the 19th century accelerated the migration process and resources poured into the area by wealthy incomers created and maintained the many parks and gardens that are now an integral part of the High Weald landscape.

One property that encapsulates the story of the High Weald throughout this period is enchanting, Grade II*-listed Twyssenden Manor at Goudhurst, one of England's most delightful villages, which dates from at least Saxon times—it was a centre of the cloth industry from the 13th to the 18th centuries and, by the late 16th century, the site of iron furnaces said to have supplied cannons used to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588.