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and miserable, as in the rich vales. All is not
appropriated where there are coppices and wood, where the cultivation is
not so easy and the produce so very large’.
Cobbett did not pass through Ash on this or other of his Rural
Rides, but had he done so he would have found there the stiff loam,
the big yellow flints, the hops, the grass, the orchards and the corn. He
might also have found the labouring people in better sort than many of
their fellows, nor would his have been a superficial judgement. Cobbett
knew a great deal about farm labourers; he had once been one himself.
In his Prize Essay of 1846 ‘On the Farming of Kent’,
George Buckland took a much gloomier view. Of the area of the Downs west
of the Medway, he said that on the top of the chalk ridge the soil was
generally poor and stiff and in places literally covered with flints and
stones, that it was a soil most difficult and expensive to manage,
sometimes requiring six or eight horses to plough it, and that in dry
summers its cultivation was almost impracticable. He conceded, however,
that its woodlands, generally slow growing, produced excellent |
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and durable hop-poles.
Buckland was, of course, writing at a time when agriculture
was in the doldrums and the generality of his views has not gone
unquestioned. In particular, the late Sir Dudley Stamp pointed out that
when arable farming paid and before wire-work replaced pole-work in the
hop gardens, the North Downs was a prosperous tract of country, as could
be seen by its farmsteads and houses.3 In that respect,
he might well have instanced the parish of Ash.
The coppices of the sweet or Spanish chestnut were the
especial providers of hop-poles of the first quality and, since there were
a thousand or more hills for each acre of hop-ground and three
poles were needed for each hill, the demand for any sizeable new
planting was vast; so too was the annual requirement for replacements. It
was not until well into Victorian times that this most profitable trade
declined as farmers began to protect the poles with creosote and,
eventually, to replace the poles by wire-work.4
Hop-poles did not, of course, exhaust the scope of Ash’s
woodlands. There was always a demand for timber. There were, |