The History of New Ash Green

2,000 years ago the Romans lived in what is now New Ash Green.  Subsequent settlers, the Jutes and the Saxons, ignored the Romans’ splendid roads and settled in the countryside.  They set themselves up in tightly knit rural communities which became more typical of life in Britain during the ensuing centuries than the distant towns.  We have long ceased to be a rural population but we have never lost sight of those early origins.  Today more and more English people feel themselves being drawn back as we are rediscovering the land.  New Ash Green’s name appeared on no map, yet the fields in which it is set are old. The surrounding paths and trees, the undulating skyline, are very much as they must have looked to Kent’s first historian, William Lambarde, whose family held the manor of North Ash here for 200 years.

Lambarde’s book, A Perambulation of Kent, was published in 1570.  He was an antiquary and lawyer who founded a hospital for the poor at Greenwich, became a magistrate in Kent and ended his life as keeper of the Tower records. There is a memorial to him in the old church at Sevenoaks, opposite the entrance to Knole.  Two of his descendants, who became rectors of Ash, are commemorated in the parish church, and the parish hall is named after another Lambarde, a much-loved rector who died here in 1909.

New Ash Green’s place names will keep alive the local and historic associations of the area.  The age-old names of fields now pass gradually into the topography of the village.  Farm Holt, named after the farm that once stood here; Knights Croft, a complement to the Knights Hospitallers, former lords of the manor who may have built the present Ash Church; Lambardes, after the noted antiquary and author; Bowes Wood, to preserve the name of Sir Martin Bowes; Turner’s Oak, where once stood gallows named after a highwayman who was hanged there – and where, according to legend, an oak sprang out of the old gibbet post.

Traditional Kentish words have been chose to preserve the local unities, a ‘shaw’ in Kent is a narrow strip of woodland – an old map in the county archives at Maidstone shows a Bazes Shaw just here, and, like the ancient fields, it gives its name to a residential neighbourhood in the new village.  ‘Minnis’ is the Kentish word for commonland or open space, applied here to the large tract of common parkland near the centre.  A ‘forstal’ is a green before a house.  The word ‘wend’ which we use today is related to the Kentish noun ‘went’, meaning a path or way; it survives near Goudhurst and Cranbrook and in other county districts of Kent, and now at New Ash Green where the Wents are the main pedestrian ways which link up places in the village quite separately from the roads.

Older still is the location of the Roman villa between Bowes Wood and Westfield, suggesting that this was a residential site nearly 2,000 years ago.  The foundations were excavated in 1914 and revealed a rectangular building over 100 feet long by some 50 feet wide, most of it used as a hall with the domestic apartments at the west end.  Fragments of pottery, tiles and bricks were unearthed, but nothing approaching the splendours of Lullingstone villa near Eynsford, five miles away.

Today, the fields and villages around New Ash Green share much of the traditional Kentish character.  It is man-made landscape, one in which men have worked and made a living for a thousand years and more.  All change is disruptive; but change is also history – as one senses in a part of Kent that has been close to big events for as long as men have lived there.  New generations may even re-establish, in a modern setting, traditional patterns of living in which the community provides locally for its own needs.

These needs demand modern resources; in the country, no less than in towns and suburbs, people expect comfort and convenience.

There is much more about the history of the village on the Kent Archaeological Society's website and in other online sources - see the Links page.