Exploring Kent's Past

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Monument details

Summary

Trenley Park, certainly the oldest documented deer park in Kent, as well as one of the oldest in England. The park, of just under three hundred acres is first mentioned in a charter dated from 1071-82, and a little later is one of only two parks in Kent mentionedin Domesday. By the early fifteenth century the park ceased to be enclosed.

Monument Types

• DEER PARK (DEER PARK, Medieval - 1066 AD to 1539 AD)

Full description

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(TR 193594) Trenley Park, certainly the oldest documented deer park in Kent, as well as one of the oldest in England. The park, of just under three hundred acres is first mentioned in a charter dated from 1071-82, and a little later is one of only two parks in Kent mentionedin Domesday. By the early fifteenth century the park ceased to be enclosed. To the north, part of the area is now covered by lakes after gravel digging in the 1970s. Apart from this, however, most of the other boundaries of the park can be traced on the ground, though within the park (now largely sweet chestnut coppices with standards) a lot of gravel and sand digging has taken place within the last thirty years. The shape is typical of a medieval deer park, and in many places the remains of the park bank with an external ditch can be seen. Beyond the Lampen Stream along the southern and eastern edges of East Wood much of the area is now arable but the bank and outer ditch along these sides are still very clear except in the south east corner. (1)

Boundary mapped by Susan Pittman (2)

<1> Arch Cant 99 1983 115-119 plan (T Tatton-Brown) (OS Card Reference). SKE36335.

<2> Susan Pittman, 2011, Elizabethan and Jacobean Deer Parks in Kent (Monograph). SKE32115.

Sources and further reading