with the termination of Jane’s life interest, the Fowlers’ Ash manors passed into the possession of her great-nephew, another Multon Lambard, who was head of the main branch of the family. He was to remain lord of Ash for upwards of forty-five years.
   The Multon last-mentioned eventually left Sevenoaks Park, which was subsequently sold and the house demolished, and built on the ridge to the south of the town the house called Beechmont, where the family lived until the closing years of the last century. Multon was succeeded by his son William Lambard and he, in 1866, by his son Multon Lambarde. Many years later, this Multon bought the Bradbourne estate or, rather, what remained of it after it had been bisected by the London Chatham and Dover Railway’s line between the Bat and :Ball and Tub’s Hill stations. His son, Major William Gore Lambarde, who inherited the family estates in 1896, preferred Bradbourne Hall to Beechmont and lived there some thirty years. When he left, Bradbourne was sold and subsequently developed as a housing estate, with an area encompassing Henry Bosvile’ s chain of lakes preserved as a public park. Beechmont survived into the Second World War, when its days were ended by a flying bomb.¹³
   When Major Lambarde’s daughter, Mrs C.O. Campbell, succeeded her father and became lady of the manors of Ash and Holiwell, there was little left of the manorial system, but she long remained owner of 

Ash Place and much land in the parish, as also of the advowson. The present owner and patron is her nephew, Mr Anthony Scott.
   Probably from the departure of the Fowlers and certainly later in the same century, Ash Place was used as a farmhouse, albeit rather a grand one. In 1780 the occupier was Charles Whitehead, who presumably was a relative of the Revd Charles Whitehead, the then rector of Ash. The Land Tax assessment for that year shows that he was tenant of three holdings which he rented from Multon Lambard for a total of £85 per annum and of which much the largest, for which the rent was £63, must have been Ash Place Farm. At the time of the 1792 survey that consisted of about 308 acres and was being farmed by Whitehead conjointly with the thirty-eight odd acres of the adjoining Pease Hill Farm.
   Forty years on, the tenant was Robert Olive, a native of Mayfield, in Sussex; by 1839 he was working upwards of four hundred acres, described in the Tithe Commutation agreement of that year as ‘Cuckholds Corner Ash Place and Peas Hills (sic) Farm’. About 1845 Olive moved on to the smaller North Ash Farm. For the next few years the farmer at Ash Place was one John Slaughter his successor was William Mungeam, one of a well-known Meopham family. The relevant return for the census of 1851