As Benjamin Harrison was quick to find, there is in and around Ash a wealth in number and variety of worked flints from the Stone Ages, but it would be rash indeed to conclude that the places where these implements have been found are necessarily at, or even very near, abodes of Stone Age man. In fact, there was little to make the North Downs congenial to primitive peoples; the surface was largely covered by dense beech and other forests and the water table lay at a great depth. To the south of the chalk escarpment, a middle Palaeolithic people inhabited the rock shelters at Oldbury in Ightham, but there were no rocks in Ash and, save for the forests, very little shelter.
   Neolithic man was not far away. At Trottiscliffe and Addington, where the land falls away from the steep 

slopes of the Downs, he raised impressive monuments to his dead. Westwards from Ash, he may well have cultivated the plateau above the Darent at Horton Kirby. Nearer at hand, his artefacts have been found in some profusion on an easterly slope of the Fawkham valley, in the bottom of which a river may still have flowed in his time and, for that matter, long after. If he lived and farmed there, he may also have lived and farmed in some part or parts of Ash, but there is no compelling evidence that he was settled in either place.
   The earliest place of habitation in Ash that has so far come to light is an Early Iron Age farmstead, discovered by local archaeologists during these last years in the New Ash Green area. It is some two miles from a site, so far