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.

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.