that was only temporarily abated in early Victorian times.¹⁷ The terrain of Ash is not a first choice for fruit, but orchards and soft fruit were eventually planted on quite a large scale and in the event Ash fruit has outlived Ash hops. In the eighteenth century, however, fruit was not grown commercially in the parish, although almost every farm and smallholding had its small orchard for domestic use hard by the house. By way of exception, Rands House Farm had a ‘Great Orchard’ as well as a ‘Little Orchard’, but the ‘Great Orchard’ was of barely one acre.
   Ash’s other trees and with six hundred and thirty-four acres of woodland in the parish they were many - had both commercial and domestic uses and, no doubt, sporting ones as well, There were fifty woods, of which about half exceeded five acres in area; in addition, there were more than seventy of the little shaws that are so characteristic of this countryside. Happily, many of Ash’s woods have survived and so, too, have the names by which most of them have been known through the centuries. Woods are tenacious of their names. In modern times names of fields, always rather more volatile, have all too often fallen into disuse and fast disappearing hedgerows and changing field patterns do

not offer good prospect for those that have survived. Even, however, in times long past some woods lost their separate identities and some fields their hedgerows. Mr Fulljames himself made special mention that Hall Wood had anciently consisted of Hall Wood, Sweeters Wood and Home Wood, adding that ‘there being no distinct Boundaries left of the separations, it’s now all called Hall Wood’; he also noted that Leevins Field and Cage Field at Lower Pettings ‘are laid together, the Fence that parted them being Grub’s up’.
   The heavily wooded southerly parts of the parish included two of its three major woods, Peckham Wood of seventy-seven acres and Hall Wood which, with the accretion of Sweeters and Home Woods, covered sixty-three acres. West Field Wood, of twenty-three acres, had kept its separate identity although it adjoined Hall Wood and was in the same Lambard ownership. As tenant of Hall and West Field Woods and, also, of the seventeen-acre Chalk Wood and the six-acre Pettings Wood, both at Lower Pettings, Henry Thorpe must have found some of the woodland industries a profitable sideline, even if, as is likely, his landlords had reserved to themselves the timber.