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The Story of Richard Bertram House and Garden Lodge, Danehill, East Sussex

Danehill has nothing to do with the Danes. Though some people will show you a clump of trees where the Danes were buried by the Saxons. The name comes from Denne, the Saxon and Early English word for a clearing in the Forest for farming and habitation. There is a 1279 record of this place as Denne, then it went through variants including Denhill in 1437, Danhill Green in Tudor times, and eventually Danehill in the last couple of centuries.

We are in the Weald of Sussex, to the East is the Weald of Kent. The word Weald in Saxon and Early English meant wild unmanaged forest, which from prehistoric times covered much of England; it was practically continuous over Kent, Sussex, into Hampshire, from the South Coast to the Thames (it is now thought even over the chalk of the South and North Downs), mainly oak, ash and beech. This expanse was called The Andreds­weald, the Romans called it Anderida. The area where Danehill is situ­ated, on the sandstone ridge halfway between the Downs, is now called The High Weald, comprising Ashdown Forest, Balcombe Forest, St. Leonard's Forest. The sandstone contains iron ore, which made central Sussex and Kent the major iron-producing area of England from Celtic and Roman times right up to the mid-1700's.

Evidently the Weald was being penetrated in pre-Roman times by the Celts, the 'ancient Britons' as there are known to be Iron Age tracks, including the line of Freshfield Lane running from the Danehill village centre westwards and possibly other lengths along Ley lines. The Roman occupation also left traces in this area including some stretches of roads and perhaps Roman bricks in the wall of one old house, but the main opening up of the Weald must have taken off in Saxon times, building up in the middle Ages, by the creation of the dennes by people moving in from nearby and distant towns, for the purposes of agriculture and the iron industry, with small protected habitation settlements (the lucky ones' became the modern villages) and isolated homesteads.

Danehill parish was formed in the mid 19th Century out of part of Fletching to the south-east (Manor of Sheffield) and part of Horsted Keynes to the north-west (Manor of Broadhurst). The first simple Danehill church was built then, near the site of the present 19C church, which is quite an architectural affair, worth going to see. So there had to be a Vicar and he needed a Vicarage.

A local landowner gave the site for the building and grounds to Queen Anne's Bounty (the Landowning arm of the Church of England) and you can see a sma1l coloured glass window pane commemorating this above the smaller side window in the hall. The Vicarage (now Richard Bertram House, practically unchanged) was built in 1852 and there is at small plaque on the wall just to the left of the glass door, giving the names of everybody concerned, including the first Vicar. His sister lived there for a few years and before emigrating to Australia wrote a best-selling book, which referenced the house and the village: “The Letters of Rachel Henning”.

The house remained the Vicarage well into the 1930's, But in 1939 or 1940 the Church sold the house because it was much too large for a modern vicar's needs and he moved into the village.

A developer bought the house, then the Army took it off his hands and later in the War used it for housing Prisoners of War, Italian followed by German, working on local farms. On the outside of the stone arch around the porch front door you can see Italian names and words scratched into the stone. Among these is 'VV il Re' (Evviva il Re i.e. God Save the King) to show they were loyalist Italians but not Fascists.

When the Army gave the house up it was bought by a Mrs. Bird and her daughter and set up as a nursery home for war orphans and unwanted babies. This is when the back annexe, The Garden Lodge, was built. They called the place Cherrils.

In 1954, it was bought by Adeline Ling who named the house after her late husband: Richard Bertram (Ling)