Another decade was to pass before the arrival of what is now Ash’s principal commuting station. That was, and is, at Longfield, but at the behest of the lord of the manor of Fawkham was called after that place. Its original name survived beyond the Second World War.
    The most important direct result of the railway development for Ash and its neighbours was that it greatly simplified and expedited the despatch of farm produce to the London market. Another consequence was that farmers became much more mobile, it being comparatively easy for them to move lock, stock and barrel. In the late eighteen-fifties, a new tenant arrived with his family at Terry’s Lodge from as far away as Suffolk. He evidently brought with him two farm servants, one a married man complete with family. It could well be

that his live and dead stock came too.
   Over the years, the infiltration of new blood into the Ash farming community continued, but until much more recent times the railways took more people away from Ash than they brought into it.
   In the decade that followed the census of 1851, there was a substantial fall in the number of people living in the parish. With the progress of the industrial revolution, evidenced locally, and not wholly beneficially, by the great new paper mills built on the site of an old flour mill at South Darenth, the recruiting requirements of an army fighting a war in the Crimea or putting down a mutiny in India and the opening up of new lands overseas, there was plenty of inducement for the more adventurous of the younger men to look beyond their country parishes