IT IS PERHAPS WORTH stating one obvious point: before the medieval period there was no distinction between the area that eventually become Ashdown Forest and the areas that surrounded it. We might point to its higher altitude and more open vegetation canopy compared with most of the surrounding Weald, but in most other respects it was undifferentiated.

The enormous spans of time with which this chapter deals means that much has to be passed over, but also that we are still at the limits of our present knowledge. The extent to which all historical research findings are provisional is nowhere better exemplified than in considering the landscape of early human activity on Ashdown. We are, of course, dealing with many unknowns. Furthermore, the survival of material remains, to some extent, depends on what did not happen later. The fact that much of Ashdown remained unploughed and agriculturally unproductive meant that any relict features stood a better chance of survival. The conservation status of the area has also largely negated significant recent building but this has actually minimised developer-funded archaeology through the application of PPG 16.

One unknown is the date and extent of the clearance of the wildwood of the central Weald by human agency. Indeed, what clearances may have predated their arrival, based on the natural interventions of fire and animal trampling? And we must also note that many early finds on or near the Forest that have been reported may not necessarily indicate any degree of settlement but may have resulted from travellers or itinerant workers discarding objects or simply losing material goods en route to somewhere else.

E.C. Curwen held in 1954 that the Weald was unattractive to prehistoric peoples because of the difficulties it posed to farming, and was thus left solely for seasonal hunting. This built on older views of the Weald as primeval forest, long daunting to human settlement. Edwin Guest's 1849 map, copied in J.R. Green's A short history of the English people (1892) (Figure 3.1), shows continuous woodland cover across the central Weald.