A New View

Terrible photos, taken with my phone through the mud-spattered windows of the contractors’ minibus on a tour yesterday of the Link Road construction site, where a new landscape is unfolding.

When I began visiting the upper Combe Haven a few years ago I was surprised to find a large enclave invisible from roads and served only by a web of unsurfaced tracks. You could at the most glimpse the valley for a fraction of a second as you crossed the Harley Shute railway bridge but risk death to do it on that narrow, busy bend but that was it. Otherwise unseen by outsiders, the valley’s advocates were few when it came to road schemes, unlike the well-known Heritage Icons of Winchelsea & Rye which had seen off the road planners some years before.

Such was the condition of the steepest support track that we had to approach the two ends of the project separately, Entering across fields I’d surveyed just a couple of winters ago at Worsham Farm. The extent of the works and the unfamiliarity of the viewpoint often made it hard to recognize an area I know pretty well by now. I could pick out the mast and barn roofs of Glover’s Fm (the house itself having been “accidentally” burned down a few weeks ago) and was then surprised to find us passing a bungalow at Acton’s Fm, formerly in a quiet spot at the junction of a track and a disused green lane.

 Dropping down to the valley floor, we passed a busy team of archaeologists kneeling among little flags. They should be finishing about now but keep uncovering exciting stuff in the layers of once-populous landscape hidden just beneath the present-day surface. A possible island community is the latest reported find.

There are flood-attenuation ponds which will hold water temporarily during the wettest weather (but could remain damp enough to be of wildlife value) road-attenuation ponds – high banked and impermeable – to take potentially polluting run-off, and ecological ponds of more subtle design to accommodate displaced amphibians.  However, even the contractors had a problem distinguishing these among the widespread flooding of the valley.

These two culverts will take the outflow from the Powdermill Valley: that in the background will support the road and the nearer one the “Greenway”. They are furnished with “mammal ledges” to permit passage of wildlife beneath the road during periods of inundation.

This is where we were the other day – the underpass in which at present the pathway looks vulnerable to flooding. But many adjustments are still to be made.

Finally, we had to turn around at the former railway embankment where, sadly, the old bridge has been demolished. Unstable apparently. To the left is the green, single span bridge which will carry the lane down from Adam’s Fm.