The Weald Talking Landscapes

In this series, I set out on a journey to understand some of the great landscapes of Britain -

to piece together the history that shaped them over thousands of years.

Britain was once almost covered in woodland.

Now no two counties are the same. My aim was to discover why that is.

This is the Weald.

It's particularly intriguing because

it's one landscape that's KEPT many of its trees.

There are lonely farms, little paddocks, oast houses...

and they're all clues to its past.

But what explains the trees?

I'm looking down over this great saucer of woodland balanced between Kent and Sussex

and surrounded by the rim of the Downs.

The Weald is one of the great wooded areas of Britain. It compares with the great forests of the past -

the Forest of Dean, the New Forest, the Caledonian Forest.

But the Weald has KEPT most of its trees.

It's a landscape of scattered farms with small fields.

But above all it's a huge landscape of trees.

And the first thing I want is to discover why that is.

Archaeologists have discovered that most of Britain's forests were felled by the first farmers

right back in the Bronze Age, 4,000 years ago.

Did the Weald escape this clearance?

Tristan Berham has been collecting Bronze Age finds from the Weald, mostly tools.

He's made replicas to find out how they were used -

my first clues to what the Weald's Bronze Age people were doing.

That's coming pretty quickly.

Could they have felled really big trees this way?

Two or three people, taking their time... There's no limitation on the size that they could fell.

-Good edge on it.

-A very good edge, that's been work-hardened.

Hammered with a bronze hammer,

put in a fire to soften it and then re-hammered.

A sequence of that compresses the metal to make it very hard and sharp.

-Can I have a go with this?

-Please do.

-Bronze Age axing.

Very effective!

-Once people had these tools, the tree-felling went on apace?

-One axe could clear hundreds of trees.

And they're felling trees, clearing trees - altering the landscape.

Tristan was confident that the Weald DIDN'T escape the Bronze Age axe.

On my first day, I was faced with the astonishing thought

that the Weald WAS once cleared of trees, like every other part of England.

By 500 BC, as the Bronze Age gave way to the Iron Age,

there were probably fields here, just like anywhere else.

But here the trees came back. Was that in Iron Age times?

Roman times? What was different about the Weald that people ALLOWED the trees to come back?

The next morning, I was determined to find out what happened to the Weald in the Iron Age

and under the Romans.

Did they go on farming or, for some reason, let the forests return?

I called archaeologist Martin Brown,

and we arranged to meet in a wood near Tunbridge Wells.

What was going on here 2,000 years ago? The clues, he said, are right beneath your feet.

-It's really horrible land to farm.

-What would they have been doing with it in prehistoric times?

You tell me! It's SO inhospitable. Even today, it's difficult for a farmer to make any living off it.

I mean, we know there's evidence of clearance.

There are burial mounds. There are these lanes that we're walking on.

-An ancient path.

-Yeah. We have no idea how old, but it's been here for a long, long time.

This Wealden clay was terrible for farming. And we were following no ordinary farm track.

It was climbing towards one of the highest points in the Weald.

Where was it leading? What secret purpose lay hidden in its origin, perhaps 2,500 years ago?

-And what's this? This looks artificial.

-Yup. This is the Saxonbury Iron Age hillfort.

We've got this outer bank - runs around there...

There's a ditch... Step down into it. ..circling the whole hilltop.

And inside it, this very obvious earth bank rampart,

-which, before the Roman invasion, when it was being lived in, had a fence on top.

-What was it for?

There's a chain of these forts sitting on the highest points of the High Weald. Very late Iron Age.

Sitting right on this network of trackways.

So maybe, as well as being a nice defended place where people lived,

it's also about controlling the landscape and the local resources.

' "Resources"? What were they trying to control with this network of tracks and forts?'

-Are they on the map?

-Yeah, four forts across the top of the Weald.

There's a couple of hillforts here below where Tunbridge Wells is today - High Rocks and Saxonbury.

There's Garden Hill, over on the Ashdown Forest, and another fort here, just into West Sussex.

And that's interesting because they sit very, very close to these north-south roads,

including a lost Roman road coming through here,

and these east-west ridge roads. So it quarters up this land.

Before nightfall, we drove to Holtye, in search of one of these key roads

and hard evidence for what resources the Iron Age and Roman settlers were after.

Those Roman roads we were talking about - there's one down here. This one was abandoned.

And it still survives as a bit of a trackway at the bottom. It was partially excavated a few years ago.

And look - that opens right out as it gets to the width of the Roman road running through.

Just down here there's a bit of the surface - Roman road surface - even, supposedly, with wheel ruts!

-Feels like concrete.

-It's amazing.

It's hard, compacted...

Well, I'll SHOW you what it is. See these rust-coloured bits...

Yeah.

If we run our compass over it, we might just...see a bit of movement.

-It's flicking. It's small, but it's there.

-Just a faint movement across.

-So there's iron in it?

-Yes, this is iron slag.

Up at Saxonbury, I was talking about controlling resources...

I think it's iron. There's iron deposits beneath our feet here.

There was iron ore in the Wealden clay.

I found a blacksmith, Shelly Thomas,

and an expert in the ancient iron industry, Lynn Keys.

I was hoping there might be some secret in the ancient process of making iron

that would explain the return of the Wealden woods.

-These are the ingredients to make iron?

-It's been heated to remove oxygen and impurities.

-Effectively, iron oxide.

-Yes.

-And this stuff is what?

-Charcoal.

-Wood that has been very slowly heated and turned to carbon.

-That's from the woodlands.

-Yes.

Iron oxide and carbon, and we're going to burn them together. How did the Romans do it?

Well, they appear to have had a furnace, which was an enclosed structure made of clay.

They needed an atmosphere with very little oxygen.

And the charcoal would have helped by producing carbon monoxide, which took the oxygen out of the iron.

-It's going!

-Yup. Quite a sticky lump quite quickly.

Really molten iron! Have we any idea how much iron the Romans were producing?

The Romans, in a furnace, in the Weald, could produce anything up to 30 kilograms of iron in a day.

Multiply that by 67 sites for the Roman period...

-We must be talking of hundreds of tons...

-Yes.

-Yes.

Multiply that up... It's a colossal amount of WOOD.

'That evening I worked it out.

'Every year, the Romans must have needed 9,000 tons of wood to make their iron.'

-Is this cooked?

-My goodness! Yes!

-Oh, yes.

-A lot of iron in there.

Yes! There it is!

It's extremely magnetic.

So surely the Wealden woodlands were replanted to fuel the iron industry 2,000 years ago.

That was my theory. But could I prove it?

Next day, I asked Rob Scafe.

He's a paleobotanist and a specialist in ancient soils.

We took samples near Midhurst.

From the layers of peat, Rob will be able to tell what was growing in the Roman period

and compare it with earlier times, when the first settlers arrived, and right back into prehistory.

That's a very nice core.

What we have here is very dark peat, quite compacted, with pieces of wood. Probably quite a stable environment.

But you can see this silt inwash. That is almost certainly first evidence of prehistoric activity -

woodland clearance and soil erosion from the valley sides at this horizon, 3,000 years ago.

The peat above it - you can see it's not quite so compacted as below.

With fewer trees,

they're taking less water, the water table locally was probably higher, and peat accumulated more rapidly.

The different textures in the upper and lower parts of the core

told Rob that there was after all NO replanting of trees to fuel the ancient iron industry.

It was hard to believe, so we went back to his lab for more detail.

Grains of pollen and organic material survive in peat.

You can count them to get an idea of how many of each species of tree was growing as the peat was laid down.

The cores were only reliable to Roman times, but up till then the story was consistent.

Once the trees were felled in the Bronze Age, they didn't return.

I really see very little evidence

of changes, really, associated with the Iron Age or Roman time periods.

-Most likely, oak woodland was growing sporadically...

-In the valley bottoms.

-Which weren't cultivated.

-What's your guess about what happened after the Romans in the Weald?

-It's conjectural, but...

if I had to guess,

I would say that the forest which is attributed to the Weald, the wildwoods, dates back to Saxon times.

If this wildwood did exist, that's when it regenerated.

'Regenerated? In the Saxon period?'

So much for my theory. The ancient iron makers never seem to have replanted the forests at all.

They must have got all their timber from hedgerows and copses in the wet valley bottoms.

Instead, Rob was suggesting that the great Wealden woods simply re-grew,

perhaps during some Dark Age confusion after the Romans left, as the Anglo-Saxons got established.

That evening, I sat wondering

if there was any way to find out whether the Weald HAD just been abandoned after the Romans

and then colonised all over again by Anglo-Saxons in the 5th and 6th centuries.

Perhaps for clues, it's good to look at the pattern of roads in the Weald again.

And it's clear there IS a remarkable pattern here.

Not the north-south pattern, which I understand to be Iron Age,

but a later pattern of small roads running up over the North Downs and down into the heart of the Weald.

Parallel, northeast - southwest. Rather contrary to the other pattern.

Is this perhaps something to do with the way that the Weald was resettled after the Romans left?

I decided to search the roads for evidence with a navigator, Mark Gardener,

a specialist in Kent after the 5th century - the time of the Anglo-Saxons.

What seems to have happened in the 5th and 6th century - the population of England fell considerably.

Less pressure on the landscape, a resurgence of woodlands...

And then as the population begins to rise in the 7th, 8th, 9th centuries, people move back into the Weald.

And what happens is, those manors on the north and northeast of Kent

are driving their cattle and pigs down into the Weald to use the pasture that was down here

-and to graze them in the woods.

-How do we know they brought cattle and things?

-These names...

Thornden, Southern Den...

We've got Frittenden... Witherden...

-A whole series of "den" placenames.

-What are these "dens"?

Den is an Old English term for an animal pasture.

-There's Lashenden Farm...

-Yes.

-That farm may have kept its name for over 1,000 years.

During this time, these settlements were sort of outstations.

-They weren't developing into typical English country villages.

-Oh, it's QUITE different.

-It's isolated hamlets and farmsteads. Very few villages.

-And this pattern is persisting?

-Remarkably, yes.

The pattern established from 1,000 years ago

is still the pattern that we can see here on the map, in the countryside.

The pattern of settlement made it look certain that the trees HAD returned after the Romans.

Then in the centuries before 1066, the Norman Conquest,

the Weald WAS resettled - not by farmers who felled swathes of woodland,

but by Saxon ranchers snatching back a few fields at a time.

It was they who named this the Weald, like "wald", the Germanic word for forest.

What's amazing is that their little clearings are still there,

and their farms, 1,000 years later, still lost among the trees.

The isolated farms and small fields remain. A pastoral landscape.

But why weren't the woodlands cleared to make more fields, as happened all over Britain?

What is it about this Wealden landscape that has sustained this balance down through the years?

I put the question to Martin Brown, and we met next day at Mayfield.

The secret, he said, was a new age of industry in the medieval period.

They were using wood and charcoal especially for the iron industry.

But surely there hadn't been enough to support the Wealden woodlands before?

The ironworking that you've seen has been fairly small-scale stuff like the Romans were doing.

But by 1500, they're doing it on an industrial scale, and they're altering the whole landscape.

Forget these ponds here. These are modern. THIS was a whole lake in the 16th century.

And where that hedge bank is in the trees, there's another lake beyond.

-And probably further ones up the side valleys.

-Pretty big-scale stuff!

Oh, crumbs! This is backing up a HUGE headwater to provide them power.

And this bank here is the dam - the last one before you actually get into the ironworks.

-And we're walking on what would have been the edge of a great lake.

-We'd be paddling, yeah.

We've come over the dam and we're looking down into the working area.

-The wheel pit.

-It's on a huge scale!

-Imagine a BIG water wheel. Water's coming over the top of the dam,

turning this big wheel. We're probably...

-almost at the top, maybe?

-It's a massive wheel!

-It's the first really industrial-scale process.

-That's powering two massive bellows that are over there powering the blast furnace.

-Right!

Suddenly, in 1496, they go from fairly small-scale stuff around here to the first blast furnace.

This isn't much later than that. 1560, 1570, something like that.

And it's a real big industrial process.

This early industrial revolution gave the woodlands a purpose and protected them.

By Henry VIII's time, there were hundreds of thousands of acres -

coppiced woods, where every few years the trees were cut almost to the ground for their timber,

and then allowed to re-grow.

But industry wasn't the only demand on trees.

From Henry VIII's reign, the navy was taking oaks to build men-of-war,

not coppicing but felling them altogether.

It's been said that by Nelson's time in the 1800s, the navy had virtually stripped the country of oaks.

So was the demand too great even for the Weald?

There's a way to find out because, here in Portsmouth,

there are two ships, built in the 16th and the 18th century, the Mary Rose and the Victory.

And if we can find out where their timbers came from,

we may be able to tell whether the navy, and the Weald, ever ran short of oaks.

The Mary Rose was built around 1510, just when naval shipbuilding started biting into the woodlands,

and she was refitted several times before she sank in 1545.

She's sprayed with chemicals 24 hours a day to preserve her,

but they turned the sprays off to let tree specialist Martin Bridge take samples from her timber.

-What wood is the boat made of?

-The deck planking is elm.

The rest of it is made from oak.

By measuring the tree rings,

Martin could tell the tree's age,

how well it was growing, at what date, and in which part of the country.

It's a clue where the timber's from?

Not precisely, but by matching of the patterns, we see that there's a tendency to the southeast.

And here, one of the best matches we have is from Walmer Castle on the edge of the Weald in Kent.

The tree ring patterns from the timbers that were re-fitted into the Mary Rose after it was launched -

there's good correlation between ring widths for these years.

-So Wealden oaks are going into the Mary Rose at this time?

-Right.

-Is there any sign they were short of suitable timber?

-Not really.

A lot of the timbers are quite old, not young trees - good evidence that there was a good supply of timber.

'So Mary Rose HAD Wealden timber - and good quality - for all her different components.'

How would Nelson's Victory compare - built 200 years later, in the 1750s,

and continually refitted over a century?

This was the first time a tree specialist had inspected her.

Old timbers from the ship are stored on the quayside, where Martin drew his initial conclusions.

This particular piece - the grain is quite wavy. Looks like a tree from a hedgerow or something.

Whereas other bits are long and straight, with no knots.

-Good forest trees.

-Yes. Was there still plenty of timber in the Weald in the 19th century?

This collection might actually answer that sort of question, by dating some of these timbers.

Some ARE dated. Others, we can use ring widths. We could reconstruct the forest.

But from this collection, it looks like there was no shortage of timber at that time.

'It doesn't seem to have been difficult to find oak for ships in 1800 or even afterwards.'

Perhaps shipwrights needed trees grown into particular shapes, and THEY became scarce.

But in the Weald they planted shaws - narrow tongues of woodland where oaks throw out side branches -

perfect for houses and ships.

For centuries, this landscape flourished on the demands of ships and woodburning industries.

It was safe until iron foundries began to use coal and, in the 18th century, moved away.

Then in the 19th, the navy began to build fewer wooden ships.

Then the system collapsed. The navy no longer needed timber on that scale. Nor did housebuilding.

And the iron industry had disappeared.

So how has the Wealden landscape been preserved in much the same form through to the present century?

The clues turned out to be everywhere - the Weald's beautiful oast houses and hop gardens.

In 1831, the government abolished beer duty and demand soared.

Wealden weather was good for hops, there was wood for hop poles,

and no-one wanted the fields for anything else.

But Kentish brewer Stuart Meem told me that English beer had usually been made WITHOUT hops.

He even made me some to prove it.

The problem was, it didn't last. That's fine if everyone's brewing their own at home or in the pub.

-But, of course, useless for anything on a commercial scale.

-..scale.

-Not bad at all. A bit sweet, but it's very nice.

-But it spoiled very quickly. You can imagine -

that, with the taste of stale milk and vinegar, would have been pretty unpleasant.

And that is where the hops come in.

The hops inhibit the growth of some organisms.

They're mildly antiseptic

-and, particularly, they stop lactic acid forming.

-I see!

-So hops meant the beer didn't go off so fast.

Big-scale brewing suddenly needed hops, and hops need drying on the day they are picked.

So that's why there are little 19th-century oast houses scattered all across this landscape.

Oh, my! Oh, that's wonderful!

Ha...! What a splendid space here!

-This is a square house.

-Yes.

I think that about 1840 they decided that the heat would be better distributed on a ROUND kiln,

so they built round kilns from 1840.

But in fact it was scientifically discovered that square kilns did it just as well.

So we went back to using square ones from the 1900s.

Wonderful. Can we go upstairs now - and see the hop floor?

Lovely smell. Hops are very aromatic.

Yes, warm air goes up through the hops, takes the moisture with it,

-and up through the cowl at the top.

-And the cowl swings with the wind.

The oast houses and their hop gardens fitted easily into the landscape

of little fields and scattered farms and woods that had begun life a thousand years before.

The pattern created by the Anglo-Saxon ranchers has survived.

The trees are good for fuel and timber, and the fields good for hops but almost nothing else.

Before I left, I walked back down the ancient trackway I had taken to the Iron Age hillfort.

Now I recognised an oast house built between 1840 and 1890,

then a farm that probably stood on the site of an Anglo-Saxon ranch.

This looks like a bit of shaw woodland.

And here's coppice trees, perhaps for charcoal.

This is an ancient track. Perhaps goes back 3,000 years.

And now I can recognise the pool and dam and stream of an abandoned ironworks,

probably abandoned 300 years ago.

This is the Wealden landscape in miniature -

a pattern of woodlands and scattered farms, small fields, oast houses...

It survived for 1,000 years by finding a succession of new uses.

And the process is still going on. The oast house is part of a house.

The small field is a paddock for ponies. The ancient track is churned up by 4x4s out for sport.

The Wealden landscape continues to adapt to modern ways of life.

Subtitles by Anne Morgan BBC Scotland 2000

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