Crockham Hill


Crockham Hill is a village in the Sevenoaks district of Kent, England. It is about south of Westerham, and Chartwell is nearby. The village has a population of around 270 people. It contains a 19th-century pub, the Royal Oak, and Holy Trinity church.

Etymology

Crockham Hill comes from the Old English 'crundel' meaning a 'chalk-pit, quarry' with 'ham' as a 'village, homestead' and 'hyll' for 'hill'; therefore, the 'quarry village on the hill'.

History

The village street is on the line of a Roman road, the London to Lewes Way.
Initially a cider house and inn, the buildings of the Royal Oak pub are thought to be at least 500 years old. The Inn had a 35-foot well, which was used by pilgrims on their way to Thomas Becket's tomb in Canterbury and, in the 1950s, was recorded as a possible safe supply of drinking water in the event of atomic warfare.
Crockham Hill Church of England Primary School was built below Holy Trinity Church in 1867 at a cost of £1,252. The school was enlarged and modernised after the First World War, and again in 1922 when a new classroom and cloakroom were added.
In 1872, John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales gave the follow description of the village:

Notable residents

, a social reformer, philanthropist, artist, writer and co-founder of the National Trust, also lived in the village. Her remains are buried in the churchyard of the village church, Holy Trinity.
Constance Garnett, translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature, lived and died in the village. In addition to producing the first English language translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Anton Chekhov, Garnett translated the complete works of Ivan Turgenev and Nikolai Gogol, and the major works of Leo Tolstoy.
Eric M. Rogers, author and physics educator, grew up in Crockham Hill.