Marden Park

 

Church Road

Firing Range The scrub land below Great Church Wood, Woldingham, accommodated a firing range with retractable targets during World War I. Leased by the 1st Volunteer Battalion of the Queens Royal West Surrey Regiment. Ranges, buttresses and huts were built and used through the 1930s and in the Second World War. Foundations, etc. Still remain and considerable earthworks in the butts..

Great Church Wood

Managed by the Woodland Trust along with Marden Park Wood and a site of Special Scientific Interest.  It is on a slope overlooking a dry valley. In the wood the parish and manor boundary is marked by a large lytchet bank with a ditch on the upslope side. Many flints and prehistoric remains found in the wood.

Golf Course. Barrowleys was the name of the field to the east of the wood, where the golf course has now been built. Three barrows appear on 19^th maps.

Marden

It was intended to run the railway line through here from the abortive Channel tunnel.

The original village of Marden was wiped out by the Black Death in 1348.

Hearthstone mine.  Marden mine is one of the series of underground workings high on the Downs beneath the lodge to Marden Park.  It is possibly the 'Marden New Stone Quarry' described in a lease of 1849.  It was originally an underground stone quarry but this century, until 1955, it was dug as a hearthstone mine.  Below ground the contrast between the galleries used for these purposes can be seen.  Externally its principal features are the deep rectangular brick-lined shaft whose top is concealed near the lodge at the entrance to Marden Park; the 4 ft diameter concrete pipe which was inserted into an original mine entrance at the foot of the cliff in 1983, and a partially filled now dry well near this entrance.  The landowner laid the concrete pipe for unknown purposes.  During WWII the older parts of this extensive quarry were used as a bonded liquor store and a Customs and Excise post was established at one of the entrances.  After the war the mine remained sealed until cavers entered it by clearing and descending the shaft in 1978.  Quarrying tools were found and are preserved in the Croydon Natural History and Scientific Society Ltd's museum.  Today in Marden one can find clear spaces, brick partitions and steel doors (which are evidence of the bonded liquor store days); evidence of an early plate railway; and traces of mushroom growing which took place before WWII.  More sinister are small recent roof-falls, which indicate the instability of the mine.

Cob Hill Mine.  Slightly to the east of Marden quarry but still in the dell below Marden Park Lodge are the remains of a drift entrance, which is assumed to lead into Cob Hill mine.  This is mentioned in government mining records of 1899 but has not been entered in recent times.

The Gnomeys.  In the vicinity of Marden and Cob Hill mines is a shallow series of short disconnected subterranean passages in very soft rock, which have been dubbed 'The Gnomeys'.  Their purpose is not known.

The Rabbit Mine  This is one of series of Upper Greensand mines along the Godstone escarpment and fills the gap between the Marden and Cob Hill Mines. It may predate these mines as it appears that waste material from them was used to backfill Rabbit. Christmas Chamber produced a well preserved- miner's pick.

Stubbs Copse

Templehill Plantation