Ashcombe Bottom

Ashcombe Bottom (TQ 373 119) is a 66 hectares (160 acres) woodland valley owned by the National Trust that runs south from Blackcap, East Sussex, England. The area is nested in the South Downs and can only be reached by walking or cycling from Lewes, Falmer, Ditchling Beacon or up the Clayton to Offham escarpment from Plumpton. It sits in the parish of St John Without and East Chiltington. The name Ashcombe refers to a Saxon named Aecci, not ash trees as might be assumed. It is part of the Clayton to Offham Escarpment Site of Special Scientific Interest.

David Bangs, a Sussex field naturalist, says, "You can view Ashcombe in two ways. It is both old scrub on a transition to woodland, and recovering ancient woodland that has been through a very narrow ‘bottleneck’ in its recent history in which almost all of it was lost, together with much of its ancient woodland character". There are no open growing veteran trees above ground as the area has been heavily damaged, but there are ancient stools of ash showing that a woodland had been there previously. The wood's old name was ‘Bocholt’ or ‘Boxholt’. ‘Boc’ was Saxon for beech, although beech is rare there now. The area is said to have acted as cover for Simon De Montfort’s troops waiting to commence the Battle of Lewes in 1264, and later to have been a place of attempted refuge from the slaughter. In around 1870 a primeval cavern, 3 metres across, broke open in Ashcombe's hillside. It was found to contain two urns, one wheel-thrown and the other hand-moulded. In 1993, the area (TQ 373 118) was bought by the National Trust with Blackcap, Mount Harry and the Clayton to Offham Escarpment. Since that time the woodland has managed better for biodiversity, although nightingale and turtle dove still follow the national trend and can only be heard rarely now.

Data from Wikidata (CC0). Summary from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA).