FOR more than 1,000 years, people have shaped the natural beauty of the High Weald, a medieval landscape of wooded rolling hills and scattered farmsteads spread over 564 square miles across the counties of Kent, Sussex and Surrey. The ancient village of Horsted Keynes, six miles north-east of the commuter hub of Haywards Heath, stands in some 5,000 acres of heavily forested, mostly rural land, once part of the ancient forest of Anderida.
First mentioned in the Domesday Book as Horsted de Cahaignes, the village takes its name from Sir William de Cahaignes, a Norman knight who fought with William the Conqueror and was awarded land at Horstede (‘the place of the horses’) in West Sussex and Milton in Buckinghamshire. At the north