9. The Hornbeam Wood
There are very few places in England so strangely beautiful as Bockhanger Wood. If you chance to be driving from Ashford to Hythe, and have the good fortune to be acquainted with the owner of Mersham Hatch, you have a fine opportunity of viewing the beauties of Bockhanger and judging of them for yourself. Quitting the high road at the bottom of the hill before you reach Hatch Park, you follow the carriage-road which bears slightly to the left, and after some two or three hundred yards, passing through a large white gate, with a small lodge on the right hand, there you are in Bockhanger Wood; and through it you pass for some quarter of a mile or more before you come out again into the broad daylight, at the top of the Horse Park. But if you are a lover of Nature, and of Nature in her most picturesque form, you take a long time in passing over that quarter of a mile. On each side of you are trees, every one of which might form a study for a painter. Oak, beech, and hornbeam pollards, of immense size and of age untold, are cast about in the most extraordinary and fantastic shapes; some upright, some slanting one way and some another, some split in every direction by the hand of time, and all presenting together an appearance of weird and grotesque beauty which cannot fail to attract the observation of the most careless traveller. Beneath the shade of these venerable trees, large patches of fern grow in woodland luxuriance, and where the fern grows not, rushes, moss, or dried leaves form the carpet beneath your feet.
E. H. Knatchbull-Hugessen: Moonshine, 1871, p. 220
So far as I recall, Bockhanger Wood was always referred to as simply “the Hornbeam Wood” in our day. The last time I saw it was a hundred years after this was written, but the description, down to the white gate and lodge, is exactly as I remember it, though I fear Knatchbull-Hugessen would have berated me for a worse than careless traveller. I think most of us took it as a fairly normal wood, if a rather dark one. The white gates were usually open back then. Use of this road as a means of joining the A20 a little nearer Ashford was discouraged rather than forbidden. Later, after I left, the gates were kept shut, and I believe this was Caldecott’s wish as much as Lord Brabourne’s, since the locals had taken to using it as a short cut. Moreover, the times being what they were, there was some suspicion that their intentions were not of the best. Equally, so far as I recall, the wood was not actually out of bounds, yet we did not often go there, perhaps because it had no real paths and did not lead anywhere in particular. The “Horse Park” described corresponds to our own horse area. Cattle grids at either end prevented the horses from straying.