Pictures of Autumn

HOLES IN THE GROUND

Walking through Cutler´s Wood you find many holes, craters, ditches and embankments, the explanations for which are not always obvious. Some are so called dene holes, although what they actually were for, nobody can really say. Some will be chalk quarries or pits, others perhaps for extracting the flint nodules from the clay. Some may be bomb or even V1 flying bomb craters from WWII. Some 8000 V1 flying bombs aimed at London, fell sort of target and crashed into Kent. A USAF Grumman Avenger fighter bomber also crashed into Cutler´s Wood during WWII, the pilot of which escaped by bailing out. Quite a bit of the Battle of Britain took place in the skies above this part of Kent.  

There are ditches and embankments, which may mark boundaries such as parish boundaries or the very boundary of the wood itself, this especially conspicuous on the western edge of Fagg´s Wood. Other bank and ditch systems may be much older, perhaps the remains of enclosures for animals or settlements. The ditch would nearly always be on the outside and the bank on the inside and would be designed to protect whatever was in the enclosure or to stop it escaping into the woodland. 

One form of hole in the ground which is easier to identify is a saw pit, of which there are a number in Cutler´s Wood. Nearly always at the bottom of a slope (you wouldn´t want to roll sawlogs uphill, would you?) and next to a track for ease of extraction of the saw planks, they are longer than wide and the spoil from the pit will be still visible piled next to the pit. Originally they would have been deep enough for one sawyer to be in the pit sawing upwards and another sawyer would be on the plank sawing downwards. The bottom picture of the above series of photographs shows the remains of a sawpit alongside a track near Cutler´s Farm.  

Photography by Carol Fulton, Canterbury, http://www.carolfulton.co.uk/