All roads lead to ...

For my first proper posting, I thought we should go back to Dormansland, the village where I grew up, and to the oldest inhabited part of the parish, an Iron Age fort long since deserted at Dry Hill.

The clue to why people 2500 years ago chose to live here lies in the name (of more recent origin). Being on a sandstone ridge, the land is well drained, which the clay soils in the valleys either side were certainly not, so the settlers were able to cut back the vegetation to construct their fort, graze their animals, grow their crops and make use of the iron deposits along the ridge towards the modern Tunbridge Wells. The valleys were not the fields we see today, the 10 miles or so across the Eden Valley to the North Downs, and the 5 miles or so across the Medway Valley to the Ashdown Forest were heavily wooded.

When I walk along a path in a location like this, I sometimes wonder whether I am taking the same path as feet would have taken 2500 years ago. I suspect not, as I do not think land ownership did not become established as early as this. Once ownership became more organised in Saxon times, the course of roads and paths that ran between fields owned by different people would have become largely fixed, as both sets of owners would have been keen to prevent encroachment from the road on to their land, and once fields had different owners, it is likely they would rarely fall into the hands of a single owner who could change the course of the track. Country roads, such as Hollow Lane, less than a mile away from here, near the farm on which my great grandfather worked for 60 years, often come to an unexpected right angle because of this.

The picture above is taken approaching Dry Hill from the south - probably the direction in which there is least evidence of an iron age trackway.

This picture on the other hand is taken in the direction we know there to have been a trackway, to Titsey or Westerham on the North Downs in the background, crossing the River Eden at Haxted. This trip can be undertaken today using the Vanguard Way, on which both of these pictures were taken. The trip would have been less pleasant for our iron age forebears - dense forest, with the attendant risk from animals such as wild boar, sticky clay soil at the foot of Dry Hill and of the North Downs, and the River Eden (whcih frequently floods over the surrounding meadows even today).