Early History
Human activity around Leigh goes back much further than the village itself. A Bronze Age arrowhead was found at 2 Coppins Brook Cottage, discovered by A Dalton in 1987/8. The find was handed over to Tunbridge Wells Museum, and Brian Philip, who was Chairman of Council for Kent Archaeology, was approached for advice. A letter from him dated 18 April 09 brought no reply, so the story of this small object remains only partly told.
Even so, the arrowhead gives us a window into a distant age. In southern Britain the Bronze Age began around 2000 BC, arriving with the Beaker people, so called because of the distinctive pottery they made. These newcomers worked with metal tools as well as flint implements, and their weapons were sometimes adorned with ornaments of copper and gold. They raised long barrows over their burials, and it is possible that the people of this era were also responsible for the great monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury.
At that time, however, the Weald was very sparsely settled in comparison with the North Downs and the Darenth Valley. The area that is now Leigh lay beneath heavy woodland, and it seems likely that it fell under the watch of a local king based at Keston, where a large hill fort stood. In Celtic times the country as a whole was made up of small farmers, with no large standing professional army, and the dominant communities lived in hill forts that enclosed their main towns. Closer to home, Castle Hill, two miles south-east of Tonbridge, was the site of two different Iron Age forts. The first was occupied around 300 BC and the second around 225 BC, though each was used only fairly briefly.
The Roman period brought little change here. Although the Romans built 10,000 miles of roads and somewhere between 400 and 1,000 villas across Britain, most of these were only minor villas, and the Weald was unimportant in the Roman era. There is no Roman villa or Roman road between Edenbridge and Canterbury. Sevenoaks had no Roman fort or villas, while the Darenth Valley held 8-10 large Roman villas. Tonbridge may have had a building near the river crossing, but that crossing was not much used, and the Roman period has left almost no local trace here. Minor Roman remains do exist at Plaxtol.
After 400 years of Roman dominance, the evidence suggests that very few people lived in the south-west Kent area, and Leigh was unlikely to have had day-to-day Roman contact. Our village's earliest story is one of quiet woodland at the edge of a busy ancient world.