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The Weald () is an area of South East England between the parallel chalk of the North Downs and the South Downs. It crosses the counties of Hampshire, Surrey, West Sussex, East Sussex, and Kent. It has three parts, the sandstone "High Weald" in the centre, the clay "Low Weald" periphery and the Greensand Ridge, which stretches around the north and west of the Weald and includes its highest points. The Weald once was covered with forest and its name, Old English in origin, signifies "woodland". The term is still used, as scattered farms and villages sometimes refer to the Weald in their names.
In early medieval Britain, the area had the name Andredes weald, meaning "the forest of Andred", the latter derived from Anderitum, the Roman name of present-day Pevensey. The area is also referred to in early English texts as Andredesleage, where the second element, leage, is another Old English word for "woodland", represented by the modern . The adjective for "Weald" is "wealden".
The rocks of the central part of the anticline include hard , and these form hills now called the High Weald. The peripheral areas are mostly of softer sandstones and clays and form a gentler rolling landscape, the Low Weald. The Weald–Artois Anticline continues some further south-eastwards under the Straits of Dover, and includes the Boulonnais of France.
In the first edition of On The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin used an estimate for the erosion of the chalk, sandstone and clay strata of the Weald in his theory of natural selection. Charles Darwin was a follower of Lyell's theory of uniformitarianism and decided to expand upon Lyell's theory with a quantitative estimate to determine if there was enough time in the history of the Earth to uphold his principles of evolution. He assumed the rate of erosion was around one inch per century and calculated the age of the Weald at around 300 million years. Were that true, he reasoned, the Earth itself must be much older. In 1862, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) published a paper "On the age of the sun's heat", in which – unaware of the process of solar fusion – he calculated the Sun had been burning for less than a million years, and put the outside limit of the age of the Earth at 200 million years. Based on these estimates he denounced Darwin's geological estimates as imprecise. Darwin saw Lord Kelvin's calculation as one of the most serious criticisms to his theory and removed his calculations on the Weald from the third edition of On the Origin of Species.
Modern chronostratigraphy shows that the Weald Clays were laid down around 130 million years ago in the Early Cretaceous.
Many important fossils have been found in the sandstones and clays of the Weald, including Baryonyx, discovered in 1983. The Piltdown Man hoax specimen was claimed to have come from a gravel pit at Piltdown near Uckfield. The first Iguanodon was identified after the fossil collector and illustrator Mary Ann Mantell supposedly unearthed some fossilised teeth by a road near Cuckfield in 1822. Her husband, the geologist Gideon Mantell sent them to various experts and this important find led to the discovery of dinosaurs. The area contains significant reserves of Tight oil, totalling 4.4 billion barrels of oil in the Wealden basin according to a 2014 study, which then Business and Energy Minister Michael Fallon said "will bring jobs and business opportunities" and significantly help with UK energy self-sufficiency. Fracking in the area would be required to achieve these objectives, which has been opposed by environmental groups.
The Weald is thought to have undergone repeated cycles of clearance and re-forestation, and the decline in the population following the end of the Romano British period allowed the tree cover to re-establish. According to the 9th-century Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Weald measured or longer by in the Saxon era, stretching from Lympne, near Romney Marsh in Kent, to the Forest of Bere or even the New Forest in Hampshire. The area was sparsely inhabited and inhospitable, being used mainly as a resource by people living on its fringes, much as in other places in Britain such as Dartmoor, the Fens and the Forest of Arden. While most of the Weald was used for transhumance by communities at the edge of the Weald, several parts of the forest on the higher ridges in the interior seem to have been used for hunting by the kings of Sussex.
The forests of the Weald were often used as a place of refuge and sanctuary. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle relates events during the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Sussex when the native Romano-Britons (whom the Anglo-Saxons called Welsh) were driven from the coastal towns into the forest for sanctuary:
Domesday Book of 1086 suggests that the Weald was sparsely populated, but Peter Brandon suggests that the inhabitants and settlements may have been undercounted. The population of the area increased steadily between 800 and 1300, as woodland was cleared, resulting in the bocage pattern of irregularly shaped fields. Charters of Sele Priory and Lewes Priory from the end of the 11th century, indicate that numerous churches had been established in the Sussex Weald. Similarly, the Domesday Monachorum of Christ Church Canterbury, compiled 1089–, suggests that Kent Weald had already been divided into parishes by the start of the 12th century.
The origins of several Wealden settlements are reflected in their toponyms. Villages whose names end in fold, were established on better drained soils by inhabitants of the Sussex Coastal Plain in the late Anglo-Saxon period. The suffix derives from the Old English falod, meaning an enclosure of pasture. These folds were occupied on a seasonal basis to graze livestock during the summer months. Settlements ending in den, found in the Kentish Weald, were established on a similar basis. The seasonal settlements in the region are thought to have become permanently occupied by the end of the 12th century. By the outbreak of the Black Death in England in June 1348, most parts of the Weald were under human influence.
In 1216 during the First Barons' War, a guerilla force of archers from the Weald, led by William of Cassingham (nicknamed Willikin of the Weald), ambushed the French occupying army led by Prince Louis near Lewes and drove them to the coast at Winchelsea. The timely arrival of a French fleet allowed the French forces to narrowly escape starvation. William was later granted a pension from the Crown and made warden of the Weald in reward for his services.
The inhabitants of the Weald remained largely independent and hostile to outsiders during the next decades. In 1264 during the Second Barons' War, the royalist army of King Henry III of England marched through the Weald in order to force the submission of the Cinque Ports. Even though they were not aligned with the rebellious barons, the Weald's natives – mostly operating as archers – opposed the royalist advance, using guerrilla warfare. Even though they were unable to stop the army, their attacks inflicted substantial losses on the royalists. In retribution, King Henry ordered the execution of any Weald archers who were captured alive, for instance beheading 300 after a local shot his cook. The king also fined Battle Abbey for the disloyalty of its tenants.
Much of the High Weald, the central part, is designated as the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Its landscape is described as:
Ashdown Forest, an extensive area of heathland and woodland occupying the highest sandy ridge-top at the centre of the High Weald, is a former royal deer-hunting forest created by the Normans and said to be the largest remaining part of Andredesweald.
There are centres of settlement, the largest of which are Horsham, Burgess Hill, East Grinstead, Haywards Heath, Tonbridge, Tunbridge Wells, Crowborough; and the area along the coast from Hastings and Bexhill-on-Sea to Rye and Hythe.
The geological map shows the High Weald in lime green (9a).
The Low Weald, the periphery of the Weald, is shown as darker green on the map (9),The additional green section on the map, outside the other two, is not part of The Weald: to the north it is the Vale of Holmesdale; to the south the Vale of Sussex and has an entirely different character. It is in effect the eroded outer edges of the High Weald, revealing a mixture of sandstone outcrops within the underlying clay. As a result, the landscape is of wide and low-lying clay vales with small woodlands ("shaws") and fields. There is a great deal of surface water: ponds and many meandering streams.
Some areas, such as the flat plain around Crawley, have been utilised for urban use: here are Gatwick Airport and its related developments and the Horley-Crawley commuter settlements. Otherwise the Low Weald retains its historic settlement pattern, where the villages and small towns occupy harder outcrops of rocks. Settlements tend to be small, because of its original wooded nature and heavy clay soils, although many villages with good transport links have undergone expansion starting in the 20th century.
The Weald is drained by the many streams radiating from it, the majority being tributaries of the surrounding major rivers: particularly the River Mole, River Medway, Stour, Rother, River Cuckmere, Ouse, River Adur and River Arun. Many of these streams provided the power for the , blast furnaces and hammers of the iron industry and the cloth mills. By the later 16th century, there were as many as one hundred furnaces and forges operating in the Weald.
Five railways once crossed the Weald, now reduced to three. Building them provided the engineers with difficulties in crossing the terrain, with the hard sandstone adding to their problems. The Brighton Main Line followed the same route as its road predecessors: although it necessitated the construction of Balcombe tunnel and the Ouse Valley Viaduct. Tributaries of the River Ouse provided some assistance in the building of now-closed East Grinstead–Lewes and Uckfield–Lewes lines. The Hastings Line had to negotiate difficult terrain when it was first built, necessitating many sharp curves and tunnels; and similar problems had to be faced with the Ashford-Hastings line.
Several long-distance footpaths criss-cross the Weald, and it is well-mapped recreationally, covered by routes from:
About 60% of the High Weald farmed land is grassland, with about 20% being arable.
The Weald has its own breed of cattle, called the Sussex cattle, although the breed has been as numerous in Kent and parts of Surrey. Bred from the strong hardy oxen, which continued to be used to plough the clay soils of the Low Weald longer than in most places, these red beef cattle were highly praised by Arthur Young in his book Agriculture of Sussex when visiting Sussex in the 1790s. William Cobbett commented on finding some of the finest cattle on some of the region's poorest subsistence farms on the High Weald. Pigs, which were kept by most households in the past, were able to be fattened in autumn on acorns in the extensive oak woods. In his novel Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man, the poet and novelist Siegfried Sassoon refers to "the agricultural serenity of the Weald widespread in the delicate hazy sunshine".
Viticulture has expanded quite rapidly across the Weald, where the climate and soil is well suited to the growing of grapes, with over 20 vineyards now in the Wealden district alone
Although common in France, the wild boar became extinct in Great Britain by the 17th century, but wild breeding populations have recently returned in the Weald, following escapes from boar farms.
Sir Winston Churchill, British statesman and a prolific writer himself, did much of his writing at his country house, Chartwell, near Westerham, which has extensive views over the Weald. The view from the house was of crucial importance to Churchill; he once remarked, "I bought Chartwell for that view."
"Wold" is used as the name for various open rolling upland areas in the North of England, including the Yorkshire Wolds and the Lincolnshire Wolds, although these are, by contrast, chalk uplands.
The Cotswolds are a major geographical feature of central England, forming a south-west to north-east line across the country.
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