Local Area and History
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Location
The Wheel Inn is situated in the High Weald, an historic landscape at the heart of South East England. It is designated as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) for its rolling hills, small, irregular fields, abundant woods and hedges, and scattered traditional farms
The landscape has remained almost the same through the last five centuries: and therefore, the High Weald is, essentially, still a medieval landscape. This can be said of few other places in the country.
The Wheel Inn is ideally located to take full advantage of all that the High Weald has to offer from numerous walks. For more information on these walks, please see http://www.burwash.org/tourism-attractions/burwash-walks.htm
Origins of Burwash Weald
Burwash Weald was originally the hamlet called Burwash Wheel after its first pub which was thought to be called the "Catherine Wheel" after Catherine of Aragon, who was Henry VIII's first wife in 1509. The original building which became the first pub was built in the thirteenth century but was later converted to a poor house, when the present Wheel Inn pub was built about 1760. At about the same time the hamlet was renamed Burwash Weald as the church commissioners did not feel it was appropriate to have their poorhouse in a location named after a pub.
Historical Events
An episode that is recorded at the Wheel in September 1788 when Mr Pudsey, a revenue officer, seized 15 casks of foreign spirits and deposited them in the stables of the pub. The smugglers attempted to retake the contraband and Mr Pudsey was forced to shoot one of them in the arm before gaining assistance from a peace officer and securing his seizure.
In the 1830s the whole area of Burwash Wealds' inhabitants were considered to be ignorant and lawless, although gradually the hamlet was becoming more a service area on a main route between the south east, south and south west. It is reported that around 1834 as far away as Portsmouth people spoke of the Wheel as the roughest public house they had ever been in. The Catherine Wheel depicted on the inn sign came from the coat of arms of the 11th Century Knights of St Catherine of Sinai, who aided travellers.
Iron Forging
At the bottom of the Dudwell valley was the old forge, which from the late 1500's made implements from pig iron produced in the area. From the 1750's much of the iron came from the nearby Heathfield furnace which was owned by the Fuller family of Brightling . The forge stopped production in the early parts of the 1800's.
Because the area was in the centre of the Wealden Iron Industry, which declined in the early 19th century, due to competition from the North of England, and their coal fired furnaces, the local unemployed took to smuggling and highway robbery. In 1869 Mr Trower wrote that it was "unsafe to travel along the Heathfield turnpike between 1820 and 1840 for fear of robbery from vagrants".
