0:00:04 > 0:00:10In this series, I set out on a journey to understand some of the great landscapes of Britain -
0:00:10 > 0:00:16to piece together the history that shaped them over thousands of years.
0:00:16 > 0:00:19Britain was once almost covered in woodland.
0:00:19 > 0:00:24Now no two counties are the same. My aim was to discover why that is.
0:00:24 > 0:00:26This is the Weald.
0:00:26 > 0:00:29It's particularly intriguing because
0:00:29 > 0:00:33it's one landscape that's KEPT many of its trees.
0:00:33 > 0:00:37There are lonely farms, little paddocks, oast houses...
0:00:37 > 0:00:40and they're all clues to its past.
0:00:40 > 0:00:42But what explains the trees?
0:00:59 > 0:01:06I'm looking down over this great saucer of woodland balanced between Kent and Sussex
0:01:06 > 0:01:11and surrounded by the rim of the Downs.
0:01:11 > 0:01:18The Weald is one of the great wooded areas of Britain. It compares with the great forests of the past -
0:01:18 > 0:01:23the Forest of Dean, the New Forest, the Caledonian Forest.
0:01:23 > 0:01:26But the Weald has KEPT most of its trees.
0:01:26 > 0:01:30It's a landscape of scattered farms with small fields.
0:01:30 > 0:01:34But above all it's a huge landscape of trees.
0:01:34 > 0:01:40And the first thing I want is to discover why that is.
0:01:45 > 0:01:53Archaeologists have discovered that most of Britain's forests were felled by the first farmers
0:01:53 > 0:01:57right back in the Bronze Age, 4,000 years ago.
0:01:57 > 0:02:00Did the Weald escape this clearance?
0:02:00 > 0:02:06Tristan Berham has been collecting Bronze Age finds from the Weald, mostly tools.
0:02:06 > 0:02:10He's made replicas to find out how they were used -
0:02:10 > 0:02:15my first clues to what the Weald's Bronze Age people were doing.
0:02:24 > 0:02:26That's coming pretty quickly.
0:02:26 > 0:02:30Could they have felled really big trees this way?
0:02:30 > 0:02:37Two or three people, taking their time... There's no limitation on the size that they could fell.
0:02:37 > 0:02:42- Good edge on it.- A very good edge, that's been work-hardened.
0:02:42 > 0:02:44Hammered with a bronze hammer,
0:02:44 > 0:02:48put in a fire to soften it and then re-hammered.
0:02:48 > 0:02:53A sequence of that compresses the metal to make it very hard and sharp.
0:02:53 > 0:02:58- Can I have a go with this? - Please do.- Bronze Age axing.
0:03:11 > 0:03:14Very effective!
0:03:14 > 0:03:21- Once people had these tools, the tree-felling went on apace?- One axe could clear hundreds of trees.
0:03:21 > 0:03:26And they're felling trees, clearing trees - altering the landscape.
0:03:27 > 0:03:32Tristan was confident that the Weald DIDN'T escape the Bronze Age axe.
0:03:33 > 0:03:38On my first day, I was faced with the astonishing thought
0:03:38 > 0:03:44that the Weald WAS once cleared of trees, like every other part of England.
0:03:44 > 0:03:49By 500 BC, as the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age,
0:03:49 > 0:03:54there were probably fields here, just like anywhere else.
0:03:56 > 0:04:02But here the trees came back. Was that in Iron Age times?
0:04:02 > 0:04:09Roman times? What was different about the Weald that people ALLOWED the trees to come back?
0:04:12 > 0:04:18The next morning, I was determined to find out what happened to the Weald in the Iron Age
0:04:18 > 0:04:20and under the Romans.
0:04:20 > 0:04:25Did they go on farming or, for some reason, let the forests return?
0:04:25 > 0:04:28I called archaeologist Martin Brown,
0:04:28 > 0:04:33and we arranged to meet in a wood near Tunbridge Wells.
0:04:33 > 0:04:40What was going on here 2,000 years ago? The clues, he said, are right beneath your feet.
0:04:40 > 0:04:48- It's really horrible land to farm. - What would they have been doing with it in prehistoric times?
0:04:48 > 0:04:56You tell me! It's SO inhospitable. Even today, it's difficult for a farmer to make any living off it.
0:04:56 > 0:05:01I mean, we know there's evidence of clearance.
0:05:01 > 0:05:06There are burial mounds. There are these lanes that we're walking on.
0:05:06 > 0:05:12- An ancient path.- Yeah. We have no idea how old, but it's been here for a long, long time.
0:05:12 > 0:05:19This Wealden clay was terrible for farming. And we were following no ordinary farm track.
0:05:19 > 0:05:25It was climbing towards one of the highest points in the Weald.
0:05:25 > 0:05:33Where was it leading? What secret purpose lay hidden in its origin, perhaps 2,500 years ago?
0:05:33 > 0:05:40- And what's this? This looks artificial.- Yup. This is the Saxonbury Iron Age hillfort.
0:05:40 > 0:05:44We've got this outer bank - runs around there...
0:05:44 > 0:05:49There's a ditch... Step down into it. ..circling the whole hilltop.
0:05:49 > 0:05:53And inside it, this very obvious earth bank rampart,
0:05:53 > 0:06:00- which, before the Roman invasion, when it was being lived in, had a fence on top.- What was it for?
0:06:00 > 0:06:07There's a chain of these forts sitting on the highest points of the High Weald. Very late Iron Age.
0:06:07 > 0:06:11Sitting right on this network of trackways.
0:06:11 > 0:06:16So maybe, as well as being a nice defended place where people lived,
0:06:16 > 0:06:21it's also about controlling the landscape and the local resources.
0:06:21 > 0:06:28' "Resources"? What were they trying to control with this network of tracks and forts?'
0:06:28 > 0:06:34- Are they on the map?- Yeah, four forts across the top of the Weald.
0:06:34 > 0:06:40There's a couple of hillforts here below where Tunbridge Wells is today - High Rocks and Saxonbury.
0:06:40 > 0:06:46There's Garden Hill, over on the Ashdown Forest, and another fort here, just into West Sussex.
0:06:46 > 0:06:53And that's interesting because they sit very, very close to these north-south roads,
0:06:53 > 0:06:57including a lost Roman road coming through here,
0:06:57 > 0:07:02and these east-west ridge roads. So it quarters up this land.
0:07:02 > 0:07:08Before nightfall, we drove to Holtye, in search of one of these key roads
0:07:08 > 0:07:15and hard evidence for what resources the Iron Age and Roman settlers were after.
0:07:15 > 0:07:21Those Roman roads we were talking about - there's one down here. This one was abandoned.
0:07:21 > 0:07:28And it still survives as a bit of a trackway at the bottom. It was partially excavated a few years ago.
0:07:28 > 0:07:35And look - that opens right out as it gets to the width of the Roman road running through.
0:07:35 > 0:07:42Just down here there's a bit of the surface - Roman road surface - even, supposedly, with wheel ruts!
0:07:42 > 0:07:45- Feels like concrete.- It's amazing.
0:07:45 > 0:07:49It's hard, compacted...
0:07:49 > 0:07:54Well, I'll SHOW you what it is. See these rust-coloured bits...
0:07:54 > 0:07:56Yeah.
0:07:56 > 0:08:03If we run our compass over it, we might just...see a bit of movement.
0:08:03 > 0:08:09- It's flicking. It's small, but it's there.- Just a faint movement across.
0:08:09 > 0:08:13- So there's iron in it? - Yes, this is iron slag.
0:08:13 > 0:08:18Up at Saxonbury, I was talking about controlling resources...
0:08:18 > 0:08:22I think it's iron. There's iron deposits beneath our feet here.
0:08:27 > 0:08:31There was iron ore in the Wealden clay.
0:08:31 > 0:08:35I found a blacksmith, Shelly Thomas,
0:08:35 > 0:08:39and an expert in the ancient iron industry, Lynn Keys.
0:08:39 > 0:08:46I was hoping there might be some secret in the ancient process of making iron
0:08:46 > 0:08:50that would explain the return of the Wealden woods.
0:08:50 > 0:08:57- These are the ingredients to make iron?- It's been heated to remove oxygen and impurities.
0:08:57 > 0:09:03- Effectively, iron oxide.- Yes. - And this stuff is what?- Charcoal.
0:09:05 > 0:09:12- Wood that has been very slowly heated and turned to carbon. - That's from the woodlands.- Yes.
0:09:12 > 0:09:18Iron oxide and carbon, and we're going to burn them together. How did the Romans do it?
0:09:18 > 0:09:25Well, they appear to have had a furnace, which was an enclosed structure made of clay.
0:09:25 > 0:09:30They needed an atmosphere with very little oxygen.
0:09:30 > 0:09:37And the charcoal would have helped by producing carbon monoxide, which took the oxygen out of the iron.
0:09:37 > 0:09:41- It's going!- Yup. Quite a sticky lump quite quickly.
0:09:41 > 0:09:48Really molten iron! Have we any idea how much iron the Romans were producing?
0:09:48 > 0:09:57The Romans, in a furnace, in the Weald, could produce anything up to 30 kilograms of iron in a day.
0:09:57 > 0:10:00Multiply that by 67 sites for the Roman period...
0:10:00 > 0:10:06- We must be talking of hundreds of tons...- Yes.- Yes.
0:10:06 > 0:10:09Multiply that up... It's a colossal amount of WOOD.
0:10:09 > 0:10:12'That evening I worked it out.
0:10:12 > 0:10:19'Every year, the Romans must have needed 9,000 tons of wood to make their iron.'
0:10:21 > 0:10:24- Is this cooked?- My goodness! Yes!
0:10:24 > 0:10:28- Oh, yes.- A lot of iron in there.
0:10:28 > 0:10:32Yes! There it is!
0:10:35 > 0:10:38It's extremely magnetic.
0:10:38 > 0:10:45So surely the Wealden woodlands were replanted to fuel the iron industry 2,000 years ago.
0:10:45 > 0:10:49That was my theory. But could I prove it?
0:10:54 > 0:10:57Next day, I asked Rob Scafe.
0:10:57 > 0:11:01He's a paleobotanist and a specialist in ancient soils.
0:11:01 > 0:11:03We took samples near Midhurst.
0:11:03 > 0:11:10From the layers of peat, Rob will be able to tell what was growing in the Roman period
0:11:10 > 0:11:18and compare it with earlier times, when the first settlers arrived, and right back into prehistory.
0:11:18 > 0:11:20That's a very nice core.
0:11:20 > 0:11:29What we have here is very dark peat, quite compacted, with pieces of wood. Probably quite a stable environment.
0:11:29 > 0:11:37But you can see this silt inwash. That is almost certainly first evidence of prehistoric activity -
0:11:37 > 0:11:43woodland clearance and soil erosion from the valley sides at this horizon, 3,000 years ago.
0:11:43 > 0:11:49The peat above it - you can see it's not quite so compacted as below.
0:11:49 > 0:11:51With fewer trees,
0:11:51 > 0:11:59they're taking less water, the water table locally was probably higher, and peat accumulated more rapidly.
0:12:00 > 0:12:05The different textures in the upper and lower parts of the core
0:12:05 > 0:12:11told Rob that there was after all NO replanting of trees to fuel the ancient iron industry.
0:12:11 > 0:12:16It was hard to believe, so we went back to his lab for more detail.
0:12:16 > 0:12:21Grains of pollen and organic material survive in peat.
0:12:21 > 0:12:28You can count them to get an idea of how many of each species of tree was growing as the peat was laid down.
0:12:28 > 0:12:35The cores were only reliable to Roman times, but up till then the story was consistent.
0:12:35 > 0:12:40Once the trees were felled in the Bronze Age, they didn't return.
0:12:40 > 0:12:43I really see very little evidence
0:12:43 > 0:12:48of changes, really, associated with the Iron Age or Roman time periods.
0:12:50 > 0:12:58- Most likely, oak woodland was growing sporadically...- In the valley bottoms.- Which weren't cultivated.
0:12:58 > 0:13:05- What's your guess about what happened after the Romans in the Weald?- It's conjectural, but...
0:13:05 > 0:13:08if I had to guess,
0:13:08 > 0:13:15I would say that the forest which is attributed to the Weald, the wildwoods, dates back to Saxon times.
0:13:15 > 0:13:20If this wildwood did exist, that's when it regenerated.
0:13:20 > 0:13:22'Regenerated? In the Saxon period?'
0:13:22 > 0:13:29So much for my theory. The ancient iron makers never seem to have replanted the forests at all.
0:13:29 > 0:13:36They must have got all their timber from hedgerows and copses in the wet valley bottoms.
0:13:36 > 0:13:41Instead, Rob was suggesting that the great Wealden woods simply re-grew,
0:13:41 > 0:13:47perhaps during some Dark Age confusion after the Romans left, as the Anglo-Saxons got established.
0:13:47 > 0:13:50That evening, I sat wondering
0:13:50 > 0:13:56if there was any way to find out whether the Weald HAD just been abandoned after the Romans
0:13:56 > 0:14:02and then colonised all over again by Anglo-Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries.
0:14:02 > 0:14:09Perhaps for clues, it's good to look at the pattern of roads in the Weald again.
0:14:09 > 0:14:13And it's clear there IS a remarkable pattern here.
0:14:13 > 0:14:18Not the north-south pattern, which I understand to be Iron Age,
0:14:18 > 0:14:25but a later pattern of small roads running up over the North Downs and down into the heart of the Weald.
0:14:25 > 0:14:31Parallel, northeast - southwest. Rather contrary to the other pattern.
0:14:31 > 0:14:38Is this perhaps something to do with the way that the Weald was resettled after the Romans left?
0:14:38 > 0:14:44I decided to search the roads for evidence with a navigator, Mark Gardener,
0:14:44 > 0:14:50a specialist in Kent after the 5th century - the time of the Anglo-Saxons.
0:14:50 > 0:14:57What seems to have happened in the 5th and 6th century - the population of England fell considerably.
0:14:57 > 0:15:02Less pressure on the landscape, a resurgence of woodlands...
0:15:02 > 0:15:09And then as the population begins to rise in the 7th, 8th, 9th centuries, people move back into the Weald.
0:15:09 > 0:15:14And what happens is, those manors on the north and northeast of Kent
0:15:14 > 0:15:22are driving their cattle and pigs down into the Weald to use the pasture that was down here
0:15:22 > 0:15:28- and to graze them in the woods. - How do we know they brought cattle and things?- These names...
0:15:28 > 0:15:31Thornden, Southern Den...
0:15:31 > 0:15:35We've got Frittenden... Witherden...
0:15:35 > 0:15:39- A whole series of "den" placenames. - What are these "dens"?
0:15:39 > 0:15:43Den is an Old English term for an animal pasture.
0:15:43 > 0:15:50- There's Lashenden Farm...- Yes. - That farm may have kept its name for over 1,000 years.
0:15:53 > 0:15:58During this time, these settlements were sort of outstations.
0:15:58 > 0:16:05- They weren't developing into typical English country villages. - Oh, it's QUITE different.
0:16:05 > 0:16:12- It's isolated hamlets and farmsteads. Very few villages.- And this pattern is persisting?- Remarkably, yes.
0:16:12 > 0:16:17The pattern established from 1,000 years ago
0:16:17 > 0:16:22is still the pattern that we can see here on the map, in the countryside.
0:16:22 > 0:16:29The pattern of settlement made it look certain that the trees HAD returned after the Romans.
0:16:29 > 0:16:33Then in the centuries before 1066, the Norman Conquest,
0:16:33 > 0:16:39the Weald WAS resettled - not by farmers who felled swathes of woodland,
0:16:39 > 0:16:44but by Saxon ranchers snatching back a few fields at a time.
0:16:44 > 0:16:51It was they who named this the Weald, like "wald", the Germanic word for forest.
0:16:51 > 0:16:56What's amazing is that their little clearings are still there,
0:16:56 > 0:17:01and their farms, 1,000 years later, still lost among the trees.
0:17:02 > 0:17:07The isolated farms and small fields remain. A pastoral landscape.
0:17:07 > 0:17:14But why weren't the woodlands cleared to make more fields, as happened all over Britain?
0:17:14 > 0:17:21What is it about this Wealden landscape that has sustained this balance down through the years?
0:17:23 > 0:17:28I put the question to Martin Brown, and we met next day at Mayfield.
0:17:28 > 0:17:33The secret, he said, was a new age of industry in the medieval period.
0:17:33 > 0:17:38They were using wood and charcoal especially for the iron industry.
0:17:38 > 0:17:43But surely there hadn't been enough to support the Wealden woodlands before?
0:17:43 > 0:17:50The ironworking that you've seen has been fairly small-scale stuff like the Romans were doing.
0:17:50 > 0:17:57But by 1500, they're doing it on an industrial scale, and they're altering the whole landscape.
0:17:57 > 0:18:04Forget these ponds here. These are modern. THIS was a whole lake in the 16th century.
0:18:04 > 0:18:09And where that hedge bank is in the trees, there's another lake beyond.
0:18:09 > 0:18:14- And probably further ones up the side valleys.- Pretty big-scale stuff!
0:18:14 > 0:18:19Oh, crumbs! This is backing up a HUGE headwater to provide them power.
0:18:19 > 0:18:26And this bank here is the dam - the last one before you actually get into the ironworks.
0:18:26 > 0:18:33- And we're walking on what would have been the edge of a great lake. - We'd be paddling, yeah.
0:18:33 > 0:18:38We've come over the dam and we're looking down into the working area.
0:18:38 > 0:18:46- The wheel pit.- It's on a huge scale! - Imagine a BIG water wheel. Water's coming over the top of the dam,
0:18:46 > 0:18:50turning this big wheel. We're probably...
0:18:50 > 0:18:57- almost at the top, maybe?- It's a massive wheel!- It's the first really industrial-scale process.
0:18:57 > 0:19:03- That's powering two massive bellows that are over there powering the blast furnace.- Right!
0:19:03 > 0:19:11Suddenly, in 1496, they go from fairly small-scale stuff around here to the first blast furnace.
0:19:11 > 0:19:16This isn't much later than that. 1560, 1570, something like that.
0:19:16 > 0:19:20And it's a real big industrial process.
0:19:20 > 0:19:26This early industrial revolution gave the woodlands a purpose and protected them.
0:19:26 > 0:19:32By Henry VIII's time, there were hundreds of thousands of acres -
0:19:32 > 0:19:38coppiced woods, where every few years the trees were cut almost to the ground for their timber,
0:19:38 > 0:19:41and then allowed to re-grow.
0:19:42 > 0:19:45But industry wasn't the only demand on trees.
0:19:45 > 0:19:50From Henry VIII's reign, the navy was taking oaks to build men-of-war,
0:19:50 > 0:19:55not coppicing but felling them altogether.
0:19:55 > 0:20:02It's been said that by Nelson's time in the 1800s, the navy had virtually stripped the country of oaks.
0:20:02 > 0:20:06So was the demand too great even for the Weald?
0:20:07 > 0:20:11There's a way to find out because, here in Portsmouth,
0:20:11 > 0:20:18there are two ships, built in the 16th and the 18th century, the Mary Rose and the Victory.
0:20:18 > 0:20:22And if we can find out where their timbers came from,
0:20:22 > 0:20:28we may be able to tell whether the navy, and the Weald, ever ran short of oaks.
0:20:36 > 0:20:43The Mary Rose was built around 1510, just when naval shipbuilding started biting into the woodlands,
0:20:43 > 0:20:48and she was refitted several times before she sank in 1545.
0:20:48 > 0:20:53She's sprayed with chemicals 24 hours a day to preserve her,
0:20:53 > 0:21:01but they turned the sprays off to let tree specialist Martin Bridge take samples from her timber.
0:21:02 > 0:21:06- What wood is the boat made of? - The deck planking is elm.
0:21:06 > 0:21:09The rest of it is made from oak.
0:21:12 > 0:21:15By measuring the tree rings,
0:21:15 > 0:21:18Martin could tell the tree's age,
0:21:18 > 0:21:24how well it was growing, at what date, and in which part of the country.
0:21:24 > 0:21:27It's a clue where the timber's from?
0:21:27 > 0:21:34Not precisely, but by matching of the patterns, we see that there's a tendency to the southeast.
0:21:34 > 0:21:41And here, one of the best matches we have is from Walmer Castle on the edge of the Weald in Kent.
0:21:41 > 0:21:49The tree ring patterns from the timbers that were re-fitted into the Mary Rose after it was launched -
0:21:49 > 0:21:54there's good correlation between ring widths for these years.
0:21:54 > 0:21:59- So Wealden oaks are going into the Mary Rose at this time?- Right.
0:21:59 > 0:22:04- Is there any sign they were short of suitable timber?- Not really.
0:22:04 > 0:22:11A lot of the timbers are quite old, not young trees - good evidence that there was a good supply of timber.
0:22:11 > 0:22:19'So Mary Rose HAD Wealden timber - and good quality - for all her different components.'
0:22:21 > 0:22:26How would Nelson's Victory compare - built 200 years later, in the 1750s,
0:22:26 > 0:22:31and continually refitted over a century?
0:22:31 > 0:22:36This was the first time a tree specialist had inspected her.
0:22:36 > 0:22:44Old timbers from the ship are stored on the quayside, where Martin drew his initial conclusions.
0:22:44 > 0:22:51This particular piece - the grain is quite wavy. Looks like a tree from a hedgerow or something.
0:22:51 > 0:22:55Whereas other bits are long and straight, with no knots.
0:22:55 > 0:23:01- Good forest trees.- Yes. Was there still plenty of timber in the Weald in the 19th century?
0:23:01 > 0:23:08This collection might actually answer that sort of question, by dating some of these timbers.
0:23:08 > 0:23:14Some ARE dated. Others, we can use ring widths. We could reconstruct the forest.
0:23:14 > 0:23:22But from this collection, it looks like there was no shortage of timber at that time.
0:23:22 > 0:23:30'It doesn't seem to have been difficult to find oak for ships in 1800 or even afterwards.'
0:23:30 > 0:23:38Perhaps shipwrights needed trees grown into particular shapes, and THEY became scarce.
0:23:38 > 0:23:45But in the Weald they planted shaws - narrow tongues of woodland where oaks throw out side branches -
0:23:45 > 0:23:48perfect for houses and ships.
0:23:48 > 0:23:55For centuries, this landscape flourished on the demands of ships and woodburning industries.
0:23:55 > 0:24:01It was safe until iron foundries began to use coal and, in the 18th century, moved away.
0:24:01 > 0:24:06Then in the 19th, the navy began to build fewer wooden ships.
0:24:06 > 0:24:13Then the system collapsed. The navy no longer needed timber on that scale. Nor did housebuilding.
0:24:13 > 0:24:17And the iron industry had disappeared.
0:24:17 > 0:24:25So how has the Wealden landscape been preserved in much the same form through to the present century?
0:24:27 > 0:24:34The clues turned out to be everywhere - the Weald's beautiful oast houses and hop gardens.
0:24:34 > 0:24:39In 1831, the government abolished beer duty and demand soared.
0:24:39 > 0:24:44Wealden weather was good for hops, there was wood for hop poles,
0:24:44 > 0:24:47and no-one wanted the fields for anything else.
0:24:47 > 0:24:55But Kentish brewer Stuart Meem told me that English beer had usually been made WITHOUT hops.
0:24:55 > 0:24:57He even made me some to prove it.
0:24:57 > 0:25:05The problem was, it didn't last. That's fine if everyone's brewing their own at home or in the pub.
0:25:05 > 0:25:10- But, of course, useless for anything on a commercial scale.- ..scale.
0:25:13 > 0:25:21- Not bad at all. A bit sweet, but it's very nice.- But it spoiled very quickly. You can imagine -
0:25:21 > 0:25:27that, with the taste of stale milk and vinegar, would have been pretty unpleasant.
0:25:27 > 0:25:30And that is where the hops come in.
0:25:30 > 0:25:34The hops inhibit the growth of some organisms.
0:25:34 > 0:25:37They're mildly antiseptic
0:25:37 > 0:25:44- and, particularly, they stop lactic acid forming.- I see!- So hops meant the beer didn't go off so fast.
0:25:44 > 0:25:52Big-scale brewing suddenly needed hops, and hops need drying on the day they are picked.
0:25:52 > 0:26:00So that's why there are little 19th-century oast houses scattered all across this landscape.
0:26:00 > 0:26:03Oh, my! Oh, that's wonderful!
0:26:03 > 0:26:09Ha...! What a splendid space here!
0:26:09 > 0:26:11- This is a square house.- Yes.
0:26:11 > 0:26:18I think that about 1840 they decided that the heat would be better distributed on a ROUND kiln,
0:26:18 > 0:26:21so they built round kilns from 1840.
0:26:21 > 0:26:27But in fact it was scientifically discovered that square kilns did it just as well.
0:26:27 > 0:26:33So we went back to using square ones from the 1900s.
0:26:33 > 0:26:38Wonderful. Can we go upstairs now - and see the hop floor?
0:26:40 > 0:26:43Lovely smell. Hops are very aromatic.
0:26:43 > 0:26:48Yes, warm air goes up through the hops, takes the moisture with it,
0:26:48 > 0:26:53- and up through the cowl at the top. - And the cowl swings with the wind.
0:26:53 > 0:26:59The oast houses and their hop gardens fitted easily into the landscape
0:26:59 > 0:27:06of little fields and scattered farms and woods that had begun life a thousand years before.
0:27:06 > 0:27:11The pattern created by the Anglo-Saxon ranchers has survived.
0:27:11 > 0:27:17The trees are good for fuel and timber, and the fields good for hops but almost nothing else.
0:27:20 > 0:27:28Before I left, I walked back down the ancient trackway I had taken to the Iron Age hillfort.
0:27:28 > 0:27:33Now I recognised an oast house built between 1840 and 1890,
0:27:33 > 0:27:38then a farm that probably stood on the site of an Anglo-Saxon ranch.
0:27:38 > 0:27:42This looks like a bit of shaw woodland.
0:27:42 > 0:27:47And here's coppice trees, perhaps for charcoal.
0:27:47 > 0:27:52This is an ancient track. Perhaps goes back 3,000 years.
0:27:52 > 0:27:59And now I can recognise the pool and dam and stream of an abandoned ironworks,
0:27:59 > 0:28:02probably abandoned 300 years ago.
0:28:02 > 0:28:06This is the Wealden landscape in miniature -
0:28:06 > 0:28:11a pattern of woodlands and scattered farms, small fields, oast houses...
0:28:11 > 0:28:16It survived for 1,000 years by finding a succession of new uses.
0:28:16 > 0:28:21And the process is still going on. The oast house is part of a house.
0:28:21 > 0:28:29The small field is a paddock for ponies. The ancient track is churned up by 4x4s out for sport.
0:28:29 > 0:28:34The Wealden landscape continues to adapt to modern ways of life.
0:28:49 > 0:28:52Subtitles by Anne Morgan BBC Scotland 2000
0:28:52 > 0:28:55E-mail us at subtitling@bbc.co.uk