a flight of witches on broomsticks. - These oasts are amongst the loveliest of functional buildings and blend so perfectly into the Kentish landscape that, when left unmolested, they look to have stood, unchanged and unchangeable, since time immemorial. In fact, they mostly stem from an invention by a Mr John Read, of Regent’s Circus, in the year 18358. They came in good time to see the heyday of hop-growing in Ash and remained to watch over its decline.
   A late eighteenth century survey of the parish shows that nearly seventeen hundred of Ash’ s three thousand-odd acres were at that time in use for arable farming. Man contrived and found it profitable to plough these lands, for all their confusion of flints. In this he was helped, and long had been helped, by the Old Kent Plough. That remarkable implement was in universal use in Kent for four centuries or more and was, indeed, still widely employed on the chalklands during the earlier years of the present century. It was a heavy wooden plough, operating ‘one-way' by means of a movable wrist, so that all the furrow slices fell the same way. At least three or four horses were needed to pull the 

plough and two men, a ‘waggoner’ and a ‘waggoner’s mate’, to work it. It could be simply adapted for use as a two-horsed broadshare and its outstanding capabilities in the destruction of weeds gave it an even longer life in that guise. The Old Kent Plough was an object of some derision in other parts of the country, but Kentish farmers, especially those who battled with flints, knew better.⁹
   In the centuries that followed the coming of the Flemish weavers in the reign of Edward III, cloth-making developed as England’s first important manufacture and wool became the fount of England’s greatness. The North Downs were not far distant from the Weald of Kent, a major home of the new industry. The gifts of sheep and lambs so frequently found in the wills of downland farmers, particularly in the sixteenth century, gifts to their churches or their~’ relatives or their godchildren, were clearly of prized possessions. Wool must have made an important contribution to the prosperity of this countryside. It may be no coincidence that a chapel in Ash church was dedicated to St Blaise, the patron saint of woolcombers.