Tree surgery and fencing in Robertsbridge.

Robertsbridge sits in the Rother valley, sheltered by the Wealden hills on every side, and the work here is shaped by two things: heavy clay soil and a lot of equestrian and smallholding properties. The clay matters more than people realise. 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. The Wealden ancient woodland margins push English oak, hornbeam and sweet chestnut coppice right up against private gardens, and the ash on the field boundaries is going or gone with dieback.

Robertsbridge falls under Rother District Council, the same authority as Battle, Bexhill and Rye, so the Section 211 process is one we know inside out. Mountfield overlaps with the Battle catchment, and our flagship Battle oak case study sits a short drive south of here, which gives you a feel for the kind of work we take on locally: TPO'd, well-paperworked, reduced rather than felled where the right answer is to keep the tree. We'll quote what's right for the run, not the cheapest version of it.

Robertsbridge has a conservation area covering the High Street and the older parts of the village, plus pockets in Salehurst. 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 Robertsbridge, partly because the older gardens and the woodland-margin properties carry orders on the veteran oaks. 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. Bodiam itself sits inside a separately significant landscape (the National Trust holding around the castle is its own jurisdiction); we work on the gardens, not on Trust land. 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.