Greensand Ridge - Relationship To The Weald

Relationship To The Weald

It is common nowadays for the hills of the Greensand Ridge to be spoken of as if they formed part of the Weald. However, from a historical viewpoint, the Greensand Ridge is not a part of the Weald, but its border.

The argument is as follows. The Jutes and Saxons who settled in south-east England in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman empire applied the term Weald (a Germanic term for woodland) to the very large, heavily wooded forest that they found lying inland of the coastal lands and river valleys that they initially settled. This forest, difficult to penetrate and settle, and difficult to exploit agriculturally, in due course became an essential part of a system of transhumance whereby each autumn swine would be driven, sometimes over long distances, from the longer-settled areas on the periphery into the Wealden forest to feed on acorns of oak trees and beech mast. For these peoples the term Weald did not include the land cleared of forest and settled earlier, such as the fertile Vale of Holmesdale (the valley which separates the North Downs from the Greensand Ridge), nor the more lightly wooded and open hills found on the sandstones of the Greensand Ridge, which also seem to have been settled earlier. Local people regarded the hills of the Greensand Ridge as overlooking the Weald, rather than forming a part of it, and hence a distinction came to be made between the settlements on the Greensand Ridge, such as Sevenoaks, Sundridge Upland and Boughton Malherbe Upland, and those formed during the later medieval colonisation of the Wealden portion of these parishes, called today Sevenoaks Weald, Sundridge Weald and Boughton Malherbe Weald.

The practice of treating the Greensand Ridge as part of the Weald appears to have arisen when natural scientists, starting in the late 18th century, began to include it in their analysis of the geological history of the Wealden dome. Today it has become almost routine to refer to the Weald as if it embraced all the land bounded by the chalk escarpments of the North and South Downs, including the Greensand hills.