Taking a Walk
Even when autumn turns to winter, a few leaves still cling to the trees of Toys Hill, the highest point in Kent. Leaves were the undoing of this wooded escarpment in the autumn of 1987 when 110mph winds tore across the North Downs. The trees were still heavy in leaf, and the wind felled 98 per cent of what had stood for centuries on Toys Hill plateau.
People around here still talk about the devastating impact of the Great Storm and yet, for visitors like me, there are few obvious traces of this landscapechanging event. A generation on, we are soothed by beautiful English beech woodland with a carpet of copper which illuminates the forest floor in autumn.
I followed the path south-west from the car park through the trees to gaze over hazy green countryside unfolding for miles towards Ashdown Forest, with no sense of our proximity to London.
We see woods today as a place for leisured tranquillity but, for centuries, these trees were a provider of livelihoods; they fed the villagers of Brasted Chart, sheltered them, and kept them warm. For centuries after 1295, when Robert Toys paid 12d for rights to keep pigs in the woods, Toys Hill was a common. Livestock grazed beneath the trees, and locals harvested peat and firewood and quarried chert stone for roads and buildings.
A few stumpy ancient beeches endure. Every 20 years, they traditionally had their branches harvested – lopped off at head height – so the regrowth would be just beyond the reach of grazing animals.
Passing the viewpoint that commemorates National Trust founder Octavia Hill, who helped ensure this was one of the first places to be protected by the Trust after it was established in 1895, I turned north and circled east, crossing the road. The wood was silent and wet, and smelt, sweetly, of damp leaves and fungi. Nothing stirred except a blackbird and several long-tailed tits, cheeping as they hopped through the branches as if attached on a string.
Looping south, I reached the most interesting part of the wood: the ‘nonintervention zone’. After the tragedy of the Great Storm, people understandably wanted to replant and repair. In places, however, ecologists suggested it might be wiser to do nothing. This was a natural disaster; natural forces would repair the damage best.
It is possible today to walk through the ‘non-intervention zone’ at Toys Hill and remain completely oblivious to the storm. This clear-felled plateau is a wood again; 31 years later, self-seeded saplings do a convincing impersonation of a mature tree. While 90 per cent of the lost trees were shallow-rooted beeches, they have been replaced by tight-packed birches, speedy opportunists that shoot up first in most cleared forests.
Only when I stepped off the path and tried to walk through these new thickets did I belatedly notice the ubiquity of the ghosts of ’87: half-hidden by holly were enormous fallen trunks, smothered in moss. It brought to mind an overgrown cemetery, but this analogy isn’t quite right, for many of these fallen giants were still alive. They had shot up robust, vertical limbs from their horizontal trunks, competing for sky with the upstart birches.
So Toys Hill is reborn, with one small patch about as wild as southern England can get. And the fact that this wilderness is only 30 years old shows how quickly nature can repair apparently irrevocable harm. It might also inspire anyone who nurses rewilding dreams: the wild can be achieved rather sooner than we might think
A little bit of walking goes a long way on the varied escarpment of the North Downs. There are plenty of marked trails of diverse circular walks, long and short, from the woodland car park at Toys Hill. Map: Ordnance Survey Explorer 147 Sevenoaks and Tonbridge