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‘Brown Flint Drift’, in which are found many
brown-stained flints, pebbles from the Tertiary beds and some fragments
from the Lower Greensand which must have been brought down from the higher
ground that once lay to the south of the present escarpment of the North
Downs.1
Benjamin Harrison, the grocer of Ightham whose heart was in
flints, often walked up to Ash from his home; on one such occasion he came
to be married at Ash church, but more usually the object of his excursion
was to search for artefacts. His most exciting palaeolith he discovered in
1885 in the Tertiary outlier north of the church, while in the Brown Flint
Drift he found many of the ‘implements’ pre-dating the Stone Ages that
his friend and mentor, Sir Joseph Prestwich, was to christen ‘eoliths’.
The West Yoke area was an especially happy hunting ground for eoliths,
which Prestwich, Harrison and many others thought to be the work of very
early man. Who knows, perhaps they were.2
Clay-with-flints is of itself a heavy and intractable soil,
but it is normally found survived with a decent depth of loam. Where the
clay is more neamy? or where, as may |
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difficult to work; but by no means bad,
whether for wood, hops, grass, orchards or corn. Upon these hills I have
never found the labouring people poor happen on the steeper downland
slopes, the chalk breaks through, the land I often left under wood. Time
was when the woodlands played a most important part in the rural economy
of this area. More recently, some have been lost to the woodman’s axe or
other less traditional methods of destruction, but many still survive.
On a September evening In the year 1823 that acute observer
of the English countryside, William Cobbett, reached his home at
Kensington at the end of a ride through Kent. Since morning he had come
forty-four miles and in their course he had crossed the range of the North
Downs or, as he called it, ‘the chalk-ridge’. That night, after
recording the point at which on this and previous journeyings he had
traversed the chalk-ridge, he wrote:-
'Everywhere, upon the top of it, I have found a flat, and the
soil of all these flats I have found to be a red stiff loam mingled up
with big yellow flints. A soil, |