Tree surgery and fencing in Crowborough.

Crowborough is a different job from the coastal towns we work, and a different job again from Battle. It's the highest town in Sussex, sat at about 240 metres on the Ashdown Forest fringe, and it gets cold and wet long after the coast has dried out. The wind isn't the salt-laden south-westerly that takes a Bexhill fence apart in five years; it's an inland, exposed wind that sits across the Beacon and the Whitehill ridge through the winter. The soil is sandy and acidic, the opposite of Battle's clay, so the work behaves differently underfoot too.

The other thing to know about Crowborough is that it sits under Wealden District Council, not Rother and not Hastings Borough. Different planning portal, different conservation area boundaries, different officer to deal with for a Section 211 notice. We know the council, we know the planning map, and we know which pockets of Jarvis Brook and the Beacon fall inside the conservation area. Ashdown Forest itself is a National Landscape and an SSSI, so we don't work on the Forest land; we work on the gardens, paddocks and equestrian properties that back onto it. That distinction matters more than it might sound, and it's the kind of thing an out-of-area operator gets wrong on the first quote.

Crowborough has conservation areas at Crowborough Beacon and parts of Jarvis Brook, plus pockets across the older parts of town. If a tree inside a conservation area is over 75mm in diameter at 1.5 metres off the ground, you generally need to file a Section 211 notice with Wealden 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. Wealden's portal is a separate system from Rother's, but the process is the same and we've worked it on this side of the patch enough times to know what they want and how to phrase it.

A Tree Preservation Order is a separate process. A TPO'd tree needs a formal application to Wealden, regardless of the diameter or whether the tree sits inside a 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. Ashdown Forest itself is a different matter again: the Forest is an SSSI and a National Landscape managed by the Conservators of Ashdown Forest, and any tree on Forest land sits under their permissions, not Wealden's. We don't work on the Forest. If you're not sure whether your tree is TPO'd, sitting in a conservation area, or on Forest land, send us the address and we'll check before we quote.