The landscape of Coopers Farm, located in the heart of the Sussex High Weald is essentially medieval: this can be said of few other places in the country. Eight thousand years ago, the High Weald was an untamed wilderness: mainly wooded but with grassland and heathland clearings. These were kept open by the grazing action of large herbivores such as auroch (the ancestor of modern cattle) tarpan (the ancestor of modern horse) and deer.
Over the centuries, the High Weald became an important source of raw materials for the iron, brickmaking and forestry industries - all of which have left their mark on the High Weald AONB landscape. Early farmers use to graze their pigs in local woodlands (eg. Waste Wood in Hadlow Down) (pannage circa 1086) year after year.
These isolated woodland pastures were called dens. They can still be identified on historic maps and are the key to understanding how the High Weald first became colonized by human settlers - and why it has such a distinctive, dispersed pattern of settlement today.
The isolated, scattered nature of the original dens developed into a pattern of small, individual farmsteads dotted across the countryside: this pattern of settlement is characteristic of the High Weald today. Coopers Farm used to form part of this isolated farming landscape.
When the dens became settlements in their own right, the roughly north-south routes originally made by pigs hurrying to their acorn feasts remained - and can be seen today in the pattern of our lanes, bridleways and footpaths. The routes are often deeply sunken. This is due to the action of trotters, hooves and feet wearing the soft ground away over many centuries of use. School Lane was one of these routes, with Five Chimneys Lane connecting with it.
As permanent farmsteads replaced seasonal dens, some of the uncultivated scrub, wood and heath came into agricultural use. By the 14th century the High Weald had become a landscape of woods, healthy commons, and small fields. This is very characteristic to the original historic landscape at Coopers Farm.
As pannage ceased, grazing animals (such as the Sussex cattle) ensured that livestock continued to play a key role in the shaping the landscape of the High Weald. The rearing of livestock was (and still is) one of the main uses of the land.
Grazing played an important part in the creation of the High Weald's character and still plays an important part in maintaining its pastoral landscape today. This supports the High Weald AONB strategy.
With 76 per cent of Britain’s land surface occupied by agriculture, and 65 per cent of that comprising grassland (Brockman 1988), the importance of livestock farming for conserving grassland as a landscape feature remains paramount. Many conservation managers today rely on commercial farmers to implement the required grazing regimes on their nature reserves whilst some farmers are directly responsible for managing their own SSSIs (such sheep grazing at Stocklands Farm in Hadlow Down) or other biologically important grasslands.
