Tree surgery and fencing in Battle.

Battle is inland, sheltered, and the work is different from the coastal towns. The salt-laden south-westerly that batters the Bexhill and Hastings seafronts doesn't reach you here in the same way. What you have instead is older, taller, and in many cases protected: ancient English oaks in gardens that have been quietly growing for two hundred years, Victorian and Edwardian back gardens off Mount Street and Upper Lake with mature beech and hornbeam, and a steady run of ash that's gone or is going, thanks to dieback.

The soil's mostly clay round Battle, and clay matters for two jobs we do a lot of. It moves in a wet winter, which is why mature trees on heavy soil need watching for heave on the structural roots. And it's the reason a fence post needs proper drainage at the base before the postcrete goes in, or you'll be looking at the same run again in four winters. Battle and the villages around it (Catsfield, Netherfield, Whatlington, Telham) all fall under Rother District Council, the same authority as Bexhill, so we know the planning portal and the Section 211 process inside out. That's the reason the second call is usually a quicker conversation.

Battle has a sizeable conservation area covering the centre of town, taking in the High Street, the Abbey, Mount Street and Upper Lake, plus pockets of mature garden running off the main streets. If a tree inside the conservation area is over 75mm in diameter at 1.5 metres off the ground, you generally need to file a Section 211 notice with Rother District Council before any work starts. The council has six weeks to respond. We file the notice for you, with the method, the species and the reason, and we wait the clock out before we put a saw in.

A Tree Preservation Order is a separate process and it's common round Battle, partly because so many of the gardens still have the original veteran oaks in them. A TPO'd tree needs a formal application to Rother, regardless of the diameter or whether the tree sits inside the conservation area. We handle that paperwork too. Most of the time the answer comes back as a consent with conditions, and we work to those conditions on the day. The Battle oak case study is a good example: TPO'd, application filed, consent obtained with no conditions, then reduced by about two and a half metres with a crown clean. If you're not sure whether your tree is TPO'd or sitting in a conservation area, send us the address and we'll check Rother's planning map before we quote.