The Natural Hill Above Plaistow
Nell Ball rises immediately west of Plaistow, above Holy Trinity Church, the pond and the meeting of the old village roads. Its smooth sides rise sharply from the surrounding pasture and give the hill the shape of an upturned bowl. A visitor writing in the West Sussex County Times in August 1930 compared it to an inverted tea saucer. Cattle grazed across the open slopes, while a single great tree stood clear against the sky.
The summit reaches about 289 feet above sea level. An Ordnance Survey concrete pillar marks the highest ground. Surveyors installed pillars of this kind across Britain so that they could measure angles between distant landmarks and produce accurate national maps. The Plaistow pillar dates from the early 1950s and remains near the crest above the grassed pasture.
Nell Ball belongs to the natural landscape of the Weald. Harder beds within the local clay resisted erosion and left a rounded height above the lower ground. Its regular outline has often been compared with a burial mound, although no archaeological investigation has classified the summit as a barrow. Long before a house, road or chapel appeared below it, the hill already dominated this part of the countryside.
Why Plaistow Grew Beneath It
The ground below Nell Ball offered three essentials for settlement: fresh water, usable land and routes through the surrounding woods. A natural spring fed Plaistow pond, while the lower shoulder of the hill gave households firmer and more level ground than the wettest clay hollows. The adjoining slopes supplied grazing close to the first homes.
Plaistow belonged to Kirdford, an old parish covering about 12,500 acres. Farms, woods, commons and small settlements spread across six miles of heavy Wealden country. Kirdford church stood in the south, while roads from Kirdford, Shillinglee, Ifold, Loxwood, Dunsfold and Chiddingfold met beside the pond beneath Nell Ball.
Plaistow appears as La Playestow or La Pleyestow in an assize record of 1272. Documentary evidence places a house near the later Quennells property around 1294. Further holdings grew along the road edges and around the water supply. By 1520 the Chapel of St Thomas served the northern community; a plan of about 1607 recorded the chapel, pond, houses, barns, fields and roads below the hill.
Knellhall Hill and the Old Field Name
The hill carried several names before the modern form became established. C. H. Bayley, a twentieth-century local historian who collected memories of Plaistow, Ifold and Loxwood, recorded that a reprint of an 1813 map called it Knellhall Hill. Other local records preserve Knells Knoll and Knell Ball, names that describe the same rounded rise.
The earliest secure written use of Nell Ball currently comes from a Kirdford terrier made by Henry Shotter of Godalming on 10 May 1845. A terrier listed land, boundaries and acreages within a parish or estate. Shotter recorded “Nell Ball & Row” as four acres, two roods and thirteen perches. The entry fixes the name more than a century before the housing estate adopted it.
The Tree on Plaistow Mount
Through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Nell Ball remained a grazed field above the village. The great tree at its summit turned the rounded hill into one of the best-known landmarks in the district. In 1930 a visitor measured its trunk at about fifteen feet in circumference and reported that its spreading crown could be seen from the Three Downs at Petworth, seven miles away.
Contemporary descriptions differ over the species. The visitors of 1930 and 1935 called it an oak. Edward Turnour, sixth Earl Winterton, identified it as an elm in 1932. Turnour owned the Shillinglee estate and represented Horsham in Parliament. Both newspaper reports published when the tree fell in 1956 also called it an elm.
Turnour distinguished between the land and the tree. He wrote that the hill was known as Plaistow Mount, while the elm at the top was the Nell Ball tree. It stood within farmland, and visitors reached it with the goodwill of successive tenants. Walking parties climbed the slope for views over wooded Sussex and the distant Downs.
Three Stories of Nell
The name gathered stories around it. The best-known connected the tree with Nell Gwyn, the actress who became a mistress of King Charles II. Plaistow Place also acquired a tradition that Charles and Nell stayed there, and the old house, hill and conspicuous tree became joined in local storytelling.
Earl Winterton recorded another explanation. He had heard that the tree took its name from a woman of the Quennell family, long associated with Plaistow and the ironworking districts of the Sussex–Surrey border. Local tradition sometimes called her Nell Quennell and credited her with planting the tree. Winterton searched the Shillinglee manorial deeds and found no record of the Quennells owning Plaistow Mount. He still preserved the story in his 1932 account of the old elm.
A third tradition remembered Ellen Ball, who was said to have died on the hill or beneath the tree. The three stories gave the name a royal heroine, a local family and a village tragedy, while the 1845 terrier preserved the older certainty: the land was already called Nell Ball.
The Elm was Part of Village Life
The elm became part of public occasions as well as the daily view from Plaistow. Its height made the summit a natural beacon and lookout. Parish records associate the hill with special celebrations and observation during the Second World War. Snow transformed the slopes into a sledging ground for village children.
During local Coronation celebrations, young men climbed the elm and fixed a flagpole close to its crown. A Union Jack flew high above the village from the summit tree. The pole remained in place after the celebrations, turning the elm into a flagstaff as well as a landmark.
The Ordnance Survey pillar arrived nearby in the early 1950s. For a few years the old elm and the concrete marker stood together on the crest.
The Summer Gale of 1956
Heavy summer gales struck Sussex in August 1956. The West Sussex Gazette reported the loss on 16 August under the heading “Old Friends Lost”. It described a stately elm towering above Plaistow from a mound reputed to be among the highest points in West Sussex. The tree had been visible for miles, and the report repeated the village tradition that Nell Gwyn had planted it.
The West Sussex County Times followed on 17 August with “Elm Landmark No More”. Its report called the tree “a famous landmark visible for miles” and recorded the flagpole still attached when the trunk crashed to the ground. The young men who had climbed into its crown during the Coronation festivities had left the Union Jack flying above Plaistow from that pole.
The gale ended the life of the tree that had defined the hill’s skyline for generations. Its fall fixed a precise date to a loss later absorbed into local memory: August 1956. The reports preserved the royal legend and the flagpole lying with the fallen trunk.
The Name Continues Below the Hill
Post-war development carried the old name into a new part of village life. In 1955 Petworth Rural Council considered a half-million-gallon reservoir on Nell Ball Hill. Plaistow Parish Council discussed its possible effect on the familiar outline of the mound.
By May 1957 the Nell Ball council estate stood below the hill. West Sussex County Council granted planning consent for ten garages, a new access and a turning area west of the houses. A parish report published in March 1958 named Mrs H. M. Piper as the person caring for the welfare and interests of the estate’s tenants.
The field-name recorded in 1845 now belonged to roads and homes. Oakfield followed around 1970, while the hill above remained pasture. Later planning protection covered its slopes, hedges, adjoining copses and bridleway.
The Guardian of Plaistow
Nell Ball rose above the clay landscape before the spring drew households to the pond and before the roads, chapel and historic houses gathered beneath it. Its rounded outline guided those approaching from Kirdford, Shillinglee and Dunsfold, while the summit tree announced Plaistow from miles away.
The elm may have gone, yet its stories remain. Nell Gwyn, Nell Quennell and Ellen Ball still inhabit village memory; the 1845 terrier preserves the name on paper; and the survey pillar marks the height where the flag once flew. Above the roads and roofs of modern Plaistow, Nell Ball still occupies the place it held before the village began: an ancient landmark, a gathering place for memory and legend, and a quiet guardian over the settlement below.
