The London/Surrey boundary. Norheads Lane

A SQUARE BY SQUARE LOOK AT LONDON
TQ 40 59 an area so rural it is difficult to believe it is London

Boundary London/SurreyBromley
The boundary continues in a north west straight line with a slight kink as it enters a belt of woodland at the south end of Mollards Wood, which it crosses on its western edge. At the northern edge of the wood the boundary veers slightly to the east before again going northwards.

Post to the north Crown Ash Lane
Post to the east Biggin Hill
Post to the south Beddlestead


On the boundary

Footpath on Roman Road – the Peckham to Lewes highway Mollards Wood

On the London,Bromley side of the boundary
Beech Road
Long Coppice.protection order on it since 1984

Norheads Lane
Jerry Reddins Shaw

This has been compiled over many years from a wide variety of sources

Comments

BACKPACKER said…
The valley to the west of Mollards Wood is one of the prettiest places in the area, and the wood itself is an excellent environment to explore with its sprinkling of fauna and flora. Its almost magical within as you quite forget where you are. The valley is best viewed from the wood and is surprisingly large, the sheep there look like specks. Access is best from Beddlestead Lane, via Owls Wood. Sorry, - unable to vouch for right of access, and there are seemingly no identifiable public footpaths on any of the oldest O/S maps. There is also no history of Mollards Wood, and the adjacent woodland and copse, but this was almost certainly a home and place of local rural industry in the past; there is a chalk pit - a small quarry digging, at the Southern tip of Owls Wood at White Bank, immediately north of Cowyard Shaw, with another small affair sited at that woods former NW tip (1899) where 'Bronze implements' were subsequently found a year later. Old gravel pits are located 875 yards ENE at Jerry Reddins Shaw (now spelt 'Reddings') towards that small woodlands NW sector, with a much larger excavation at its SW (where the copse narrows into a broad avenue of trees) The lost paths and tracks through Mollards Wood are best viewed on the 1909/1947 O/S map. If there were hovels, bothys, or cottages here then they predate the early 1870s as nothing manifests on the aforementioned maps. People of varying descriptions, such as shepherds and quarrymen, may well have lived here, but the lack of any streams, natural springs or manmade wells seems to indicate that such people would have been deterred from settling there for the lack of that most invaluable commodity, water.

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