Train spotting

There's one!

Not the best view you will ever see of a train on the Bluebell Railway's Hill Place Viaduct

On 1st August 1882, Francis Whitehurst, soon to become the tenant of Hill Place Farm in East Grinstead, saw the first service train crossing the viaduct to which the farm gave its name. This was not the scene from the 1830s, with people and livestock scattering from the spark spitting, smoke belching monster. Locomotive design had advanced to make a more civilised beast: the Bluebell Railway, who now own the viaduct, still operate two locomotives, No 55 Stepney, and No 72 Fenchurch from that time.

Works plate from Fenchurch, the oldest railway locomotive continuously in service in Britain

The first railway reached East Grinstead in 1853, cutting through the neighbouring Copyhold Farm, a slightly misleading name, as all farms in Imberhorne Manor were copyhold until they were enfranchised in the 1850s. The name was preserved in 1921, when East Grinstead Council built Copyhold Road, its first social housing, on the other side of the viaduct from the picture above.

Francis left Hill Place in around 1896, when the Blount family of Imberhorne Manor purchased the freehold to farm it with their own staff, increasing revenue without increasing costs, and avoiding the fate of many estates in the agricultural depression of the late Victorian years. He went to farm as a tenant of the Ford Manor estate in Dormansland, until he retired to the village a couple of years before his death in 1926.

My great-great grandfather's last farm

Not that our family's association with Imberhorne was over. A couple of deaths in quick succession in the 1950s meant the Blount family had to sell a substantial part of the estate to pay death duties. Most went to housing, but some was used to build Imberhorne School. In 1974, Francis' great granddaughter, my mother, needed a job fitting my school holidays, and where better to find one than in a school? She worked at Imberhorne for 25 years until her death in 1999.

With this connection, I was keen to catch a shot when the Bluebell Railway started their service to East Grinstead on March 23rd. My plan was scuttled by unseasonable weather between my home and East Grinstead. So, I travelled a couple of weeks later, following the Medway from Maidstone, where I had watched the Isthmian League Cup Final, to its source, taking the picturesque Medway Valley Line to Tonbridge, then, in a reverse of the East Grinstead Song, the 291 bus from Tunbridge Wells.

When Channel 4 made a documentary in 1985 called God Rot Tunbridge Wells, about the composer Handel, the title based on his reported comment after a bad reception at a concert in the town, my mother remarked what a sensible man Handel must have been - she could not stand the place. I found it quite pleasant, but when I had checked the time on the Millennium Clock ...

... looked round the museum and the Church of King Charles the Martyr (attended by Princess Victoria before she became Queen), and perambulated through the Pantiles (originally surfaced with tiles shaped in pans) ...

... I felt I had exhausted all it had to offer the casual visitor.

The Bluebell were still running their opening gala service, with a train up and down the line about every hour and a quarter, so I did not have long to wait.

The view from the train includes some of my great-great-grandfather's fields, although not the farmhouse, hidden from view by more recent buildings.

Turning back to our first picture, I would have found a better place to stand to get the train in if I had paid attention to a picture from earlier in the day. For some reason I thought in front of the tree peeping up from below the parapet might be a good vantage point.

Garden Wood Road from the Viaduct

Our journey has also been following Francis' middle son Alfred, my great-great uncle. He was born in view of the viaduct when it was being built, spent most of his life in Groombridge, through which I came on the 291, and died in hospital a few hundred yards from this picture. Our last task of the day is to pay our respects, in Dormansland, where he shares a grave with my mother and grandmother.

We can see how cold the spring has been, we are well into April, but the daffodils (remnants of those planted in 1964 - I keep thinking about planting more, but usually at the wrong time of year) have still to bloom.

There are some more pictures from the trip here.

The Autumn trip home

Over the last few years, it has become my habit to go home in the autumn.

St John the Evangelist Dormansland, Autumn 2005

It is a quick trip. In the spring and summer, if I am in London and have time to spare, I often head out into the Surrey Hills or the High Weald, Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty, both excellent walking country. I pass on that in the autumn, as it is not the weather for it, and it is usually a Saturday in the football season, so I want to get back to London for the match.

When I was growing up, Dormansland, and east Surrey generally, was a fairly quiet backwater. Although it was in easy reach of London, and many people commuted, it was not stockbroker belt like the rest of the county, a spot for those in the know. Whilst I do not live or have family there any more, I get the impression that a lot of that has gone. There is one reason - frequent electric trains, making for a more attractive commute. They had been talking about electrifying the line from Croydon to East Grinstead since 1938, and it finally happened in 1987.

Not that it has made much change to the journey, past the Downs with the trees still changing colour, a few weeks later than back in the north, the long downhill run to the Eden, not quite such a bouncy ride as the old trains, then climbing again towards East Grinstead, more quietly than the Diesels.

It was a dull grey day this year, so when I got my camera out (my little Wildfire phone on this occasion), I knew I would not be getting anything like the picture above. The trees still gave a splash of colour in our wood that used to be a field.

When my mother died 13 years ago, I buried her with her mother, who died at the tail end of the first post War polio epidemic in 1947. With my grandfather not being around - my best guess is he headed back home with the Canadian Army, well there was a war on - my mother was brought up by her grandparents, who had been born in the 1880s, which may explain why I can be a bit Victorian.

The main purpose of the trip is to perform some routine maintenance on my mother's memorial. When I arrived, the firm who maintain the churchyard were finishing their work, and everything looked neat and tidy. When I was growing up, Ernie Walls, a lifelong resident of the village, worked on the churchyard into his seventies and eighties. When you look closely, you can see the difference between work done by a committed volunteer and a professional team. The people who maintain the grounds do their job well, the paths and grass are always immaculate. I am not sure if Mr Walls was paid for his work, but he went well beyond any hours for which he may have been remunerated, and the difference shows in the individual plots.

My mother, grandmother and great great uncle

My great great uncle Alfred is keeping his memorial above the rising ground, my mother is easily made visible again by clearing the leaves and a good stout pull at the encroaching grass, but my grandmother is lost to record - there is a now buried kerb on the left to match that you can still see on the right. Even the Gravestone Photographic Resource, a voluntary effort to record information in churchyards and cemeteries before they disappear to overgrowth, erosion and, sadly, in some cases vandalism, came too late to record her details.

Mr Walls was looking after his friends, relatives and people he had known in his long life in the village. When I was growing up, there were a dozen people I could think of who shared his knowledge, all now gone or frail, and with modern mobility, no lifelong residents to replace them. With them goes the motivation to sweep the leaves, trim the grass and edge the kerbs of the individual plots, a task that takes more time than could realistically be paid for.

After my maintenance, there is time to walk around to pay my respects to those I knew myself, those I knew by name, those who played their part over the years in the life of the village, and some who played their part in our national life - a Member of Parliament, an England rugby union player, a Dean of Arches, and two who signed up to serve their country in the First World War, but died in accidents before they left these shores.

On these trips I often have time to round off with a quick trip to the Plough - a constant beer range, with the Harveys Sussex Best always well kept - before heading back to London.

There was no time for that this time, as the football was out of London, in Burgess Hill, so I had to leave only just after they opened, one less roadside hostelry to be visited from here to there.

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.

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).