Tilgate Park
The park also contains the Tilgate Nature Centre featuring captive breeding of some vulnerable and endangered animal species and varieties.
[4] Geologically the park is on the Hastings Beds, dominated by sandstone with pockets of clay and iron ore.[5] This produces poor, acidic and nutritionally deficient soils which, paradoxically, supported a varied natural plant cover.
[8] There is now evidence of Iron Age activity in the region, after a recent re-excavation of a major Roman ironworking site at Broadfield, just west of the park.
[10] However, a recent (2011) archaeological survey of Tilgate Forest found no positive evidence of Roman ironworking activity there.
[11] It is now accepted that the Romans were managing the entire High Weald as a strategic asset of military significance for the sake of its iron, and so were discouraging civilian settlement.
[12] The Saxons were certainly interested in using the thick woodland fringing the High Weald for pannage or transhumance involving feeding pigs on acorns.
Local place names ending in -ley or -den indicate woodland clearings, mutating into farmsteads as transient swineherds became sedentary farmers and were joined by other immigrants.
[9] The method of the period involved digging up an iron ore outcrop and reducing it in a "bloomery" or clay pot-furnace using charcoal and muscle-powered bellows.
If any deer park was here, it might have been on the site of the present Tilgate Playing Fields, where a random scatter of large, spreading oak trees was recorded on the 1875 large-scale Ordnance Survey map (a few survive).
[9] The landscape of the Park area changed drastically when the blast furnace was introduced into English ironworking in the late Middle Ages.
This was on the Stamford Brook in the present Worth Forest, just to the north of the eastern end of the railway bridge on the Parish Lane from Pease Pottage (the bridle path here crosses the site of the old millpond, south of the dam and slag heaps).
However, in 1690 "Tilgate Farm" was operated as a tenancy and the tenant farmer was responsible for keeping the lake dams in repair.
[22] This involved creating so-called "pillow mounds" for the rabbits to burrow into, which can be found in the present Worth and Highbeeches Forests.
[28] If the 2011 archaeological survey is correct in surmising these ditches to date from that time, then the Sergisons intended to clear the present Forest for farmland.
They did clear the central tier along Parish Lane and turned it into four farms -Hardriding (formerly Belle Vue), New Buildings, Starvemouse and Mount Pleasant.
19th-century improvements suppressed the portions from Crawley to Tilgate and in Worth Forest (the latter has been recently reinstated as a bridle path).
After a succession of owners in the early 19th century, the estate was inherited in 1862 by a wealthy businessman from India, George Ashburner.
[31] Ashburner's daughter Sarah married John Hennings Nix, in 1865 at St Nicholas' Church, Worth.
[35] In the late 19th century, the Park and Forest became nationally known for several botanical rarities (apparently mostly now extinct here) including the Tunbridge Filmy Fern (Hymenophyllum tunbrigense).
[40][41] Charles was in difficulties by 1932, when he leased the Walled Garden and its greenhouses to FW Burke & Co as a Horticultural research Station.
During the War, as part of the build-up for D-Day Canadian army troops were billeted at a camp in woodland west of Titmus Lake, featuring Nissen huts.
[43] After the War, in 1947, the site was acquired by the Crawley Development Corporation and the huts began to be rented out to leisure clubs and societies seeking premises.
In 1950, the Forestry Commission bought the Forest and began to plant conifers over most of it, with areas of beech and American oak.
In 1950, the Walled Garden became "Tilgate Park Nurseries" which had another site in the Forest south of the sawmill at "Old Stone Cottage Farm".
On weekdays, it terminates at K2 and the best access is walking from the stop at Tilgate shops which is ten minutes for a young adult.
The Promenade meets a path from the Walled Garden, turns left (east) and runs to the Silt Lake.
An old colony of wind daffodils is to the west of the Promenade heading south from the restaurant, and an area of bluebells was planted around the new wildlife pond east of the main lake in 2015.
In response, the Council has produced a guided tree trail leaflet, has labelled the more important specimens and invited sponsorship.
[51] The following are available: Because Tilgate Forest lacks reception facilities, this firm also offers the following which mostly take place there: There are also special events.
Johnson, O: "Sussex Tree Book" Pomegranate Press 1998. de Crespigny, E. Champion: A New London Flora 1877.
