south. In any case, the Ash boundary passed through the stack yard to the northwest corner of the pigeon-house, leaving all the pigeons and some part of the manor house in foreign parts.
   Another substantial owner was William Evelyn of St Clere, then in Ightham, which estate his father had purchased from the Sedley family many years before. Most of William Evelyn’s two hundred and twenty-nine acres were in the southern reaches of the parish and included Peckham Wood and New Terry’s Lodge Farm - the ‘New’ of ‘Terry’s Lodge’ being here, as often elsewhere, used by way of distinction from Old Terry’s Lodge, which lay to the south beyond the parish boundary. Like some other absentee landlords who nevertheless lived not far away, Evelyn let his Ash farmland while retaining in hand the woodland. His other land in the parish was near the border with Ridley and would have been part of the Ridley Manor estate that he had bought from Sir Charles Sedley in 1769 and was to sell to Multon Lambard in 1793 at a not inconsiderable loss. At much the same time that he bought the Ridley estate, Evelyn had also acquired. the manor of Hartley. One of his descendants, who went to live in Hartley in 1872, provided that parish with a new manor house.³

   William Evelyn came of the family that had produced the famous diarist. He himself was a man of some distinction and was in his time High Sheriff of Kent, Member of Parliament for Hythe and Captain of Sandgate castle. His only son was killed by a fall from a horse in 1788 and one Alexander Rune, who married his only daughter, assumed by royal licence the name and arms of Evelyn.⁴ William Evelyn died at Bath, full of years, in 1813, but apparently he had passed the estate to his son-in-law a few years previously. The change had occasioned some difficulties in nomenclature to Michael Fletcher and John Wallis, the Ash land Tax assessors in 1808, who entered the new proprietor as ‘Allex Evenline Esqer’; in 1810, Michael Fletcher and William Norris did a little better with ‘Ellexander Evelin Esqr’.
   Another absentee landlord who lived not far away was Thomas Whitaker.⁵ He owned two-hundred and ninety acres, comprising the two ‘Middleton’ farms, West Yoke and North Ash, alias Turner’s, and a small part of Abbots. Wood, by the Maidstone turnpike.
   Several generations of the Whitakers were lessees of the Bishop of Rochester’s estates in Trottiscliffe and Wrotham and