All trees round here

"You walk across a field... with COWS in?"

As someone born and raised in the countryside, from a farm labouring family, my mother was fond of recounting this reaction from one of her town based colleagues when she found that the path, unfenced at the time, from Dormansland village to Dormans Station crossed a field containing cows. This was in about 1978, the word "bovine" was a synonym for placid and unperturbable, and the only risk of crossing the field was stepping in a cow pat.

I am not so sure about cows these days, they seem to have beome more aggressive, and crossing a field is a bit like going in to a dodgy pub where everyone stops talking and starts looking at you, chewing menacingly.

So, let's take a look at the field we are talking about.

One could be forgiven for thinking that is not a field, but a wood - and so it is. The cows stopped grazing in the mid eighties, growth has been unchecked for nearly 20 years, so the land turned first to scrub, and eventually to trees. It is a familiar story across the area, livestock farming is not as economical as it was, and in many cases, where the field is not good enough land to grow crops, they have been abandoned to whatever will grow.

A couple of miles away, Hill Place Viaduct in East Grinstead was built to take the Lewes & East Grinstead Railway across the River Medway. The river here is only a couple of feet wide, but the soft clay with hard sandstone on either side means it has carved out a steep sided valley needing a ten arch viaduct to cross. When I first saw it, it strode across the valley from the East Grinstead side, very impressive for a seven year old. There is a view over to Hill Place Farm, which, I did not know at the time, my great great grandfather had farmed a hundred years previously. Indeed, his farming may well have been disrupted by the building of the viaduct.

When I next saw it, some thirty years later, I had a surprise. It is harder to see though now, with some of the trees nearly reaching the top of the arches.

The line the viaduct was built to carry was closed in 1958, and after some use as a carriage siding, it has been unused since the mid eighties. However, it is soon to be brought back in use by the Bluebell Railway, as part of their Northern Extension to East Grinstead.

One area where the growth of trees in the absence of grazing animals is really apparent is on the North Downs, which I shall look at in a future post.