Toys Hill: The Hamlet Where a 145-Room Mansion Vanished in 33 Years

Toys Hill barely counts as a village at all - a scatter of houses on a wooded ridge above Brasted, in the Sevenoaks district - but it sits at the top of one of the highest points in Kent, 235 metres up, and it played a real part in starting the National Trust.

On Puddledock Lane sits a small stone terrace with a low bench and an old sunken well, looking out over the Weald. It was donated to the fledgling National Trust in 1898 by Octavia Hill, one of the Trust's three founders, who lived nearby at Crockham Hill - making it one of the Trust's very first properties, just three years after it was founded. The Trust kept adding to its holding here piece by piece, culminating in a 1981 appeal that bought up the surrounding woodland and named the final parcel the Octavia Hill Woodland. Between it all, the estate now runs to more than 200 acres, designated a Site of Special Scientific Interest and rated Grade I nationally for nature conservation.

The strangest thing to have stood at Toys Hill is long gone. In 1906, Philip Stanhope, 1st Baron Weardale - a Liberal politician and anti-suffrage campaigner once attacked with a dogwhip at Euston Station by a suffragette who mistook him for the Prime Minister - built Weardale Manor here: a 145-room house so large it was only ever occupied during the summer months. Stanhope died in 1923 with no heir, and his widow, a Tolstoy family relative, rarely visited afterwards. When she died in 1934 she left the house to a nephew who couldn't afford to keep it up; lacking the funds to maintain it, he let it fall into disrepair, and it was demolished in 1939 - just 33 years after it was built. The site today is a flat grassy clearing with an interpretation board and a stand of Scots pine; a nearby obelisk marks the Trust's later acquisition of the land. The Weardale name hasn't quite disappeared, though - it was revived in 2014 for the former MI5 chief Jonathan Evans, who took the title Baron Evans of Weardale, of Toys Hill.

Toys Hill's woods were once known for ancient beech pollards dating back centuries, to when the land was common ground where locals grazed pigs and cattle and dug for chert and firewood. Most of those old beeches were destroyed in the Great Storm of 1987, one of the worst-hit sites in the whole storm. Rather than replant everything, the Trust has let parts of one wood, Scords Wood, regenerate entirely on its own - sessile oak, beech and birch have moved back in naturally - so that Natural England can study how ancient woodland recovers from catastrophic damage without human help.

It isn't cheap. HM Land Registry's Price Paid data records a handful of standard residential sales around Toys Hill over the past five years, and the spread is wide: Weardale Bungalow, a leasehold property recalling the old estate, sold for £490,000 in 2021, while Toys Hill House fetched £2,160,000 in 2020 and Little Scords went for £2,500,000 in late 2025. Treat that as a snapshot rather than an average - a hamlet this size sees very few sales - but seven-figure prices are clearly not unusual here.

There's a small National Trust car park, and dogs are welcome as long as they're kept under close control on the paths - there's no café or shop, this is open-access woodland rather than a visitor attraction with facilities. Toys Hill sits within walking or short driving distance of two other National Trust properties, Emmetts Garden and Winston Churchill's former home Chartwell, making it easy to turn a visit into a fuller day out. Sources: National Trust, Wikipedia and HM Land Registry Price Paid Data.