Halling Views...: buttercups

Tuesday, 16 May 2023

Church Hill...

The buttercups were out...

Panorama form Upper Church Hill....

The above shot took several goes as the area is fenced off and I am too old and creaky to climb over the fence. I was determined to catch the view on camera however, so I had to have the camera on a pole and poke it through the fence. It somehow seems just wrong that a private landowner can fence off such a spectacular view point, one that provides such good views of the valley and the village...

Baker's Field (Lower Church Hill - mercifully still accessible...)

Sunday, 24 April 2022

Boundary stones and buttercups...

Southern Bush Valley parish boundary stones...

Today I decided to try and trace the line of concrete parish boundary markers that the 1907 OS map revision suggests run from North Wood westwards down to the bottom of Bush Valley...

Marker stone locations superimposed on an aerial map of southern Bush valley. The circled ones are those I found...

The map suggested that there was a stone right by the path that runs through North Wood (on the right of the above map) but I could not find it. In his book, Cuxton - A Kentish Village, author Derek Church describes being able to track westwards down the hill, following the line of markers. I tried this but hit an impenetrable barrier of scrub and brambles, so I scrambled back up the hill, returning to the path through North Wood. This comes out by the overhead power cables, and it is possible to follow the clearing under the pylons down to the bottom of Bush Valley.

Boundary post example...

Heading east up the slope between the field fence and the old pheasant pen, a row of five boundary markers can be found, although the fifth one behind the old pheasant look-out is pretty well hidden in the scrub beneath an old yew tree.

Boundary post...

I did take a picture of each of them but they are all similar in appearance so I haven't posted them all here. Superficially these stones seem similar in design to the Hilton and Anderson quarry markers, two of which can be found further up the valley above White Pit. They are smaller, however, and lack the full stop between the H and the A, which the White Pit stones have. Some people believe that the "HA" on these stones also stands for Hilton and Anderson, but personally I think it just stands for HAlling...

I tried to find the sixth one but once again the brambles made the quest difficult. I have no doubt it is hiding in there somewhere.

Panorama of Bush Valley from the eastern path...

I took the path that tracks along the eastern edge of Bush Valley back to Upper Bush. The above panorama shows the rather blasted look of the valley at the moment, courtesy of Vineyard Farms...