About this site

visithawkhurst.org.uk preserves the Hawkhurst village guide — the community website that listed the village's accommodation, pubs and restaurants, attractions, shops, trades, clubs and churches, kept an event diary, and ran a message board, from 2010 until it went offline in 2018.

Where the content comes from

The original site was built by and for people in Hawkhurst and the surrounding villages of the Weald: Sandhurst, Cranbrook, Benenden, Rolvenden, Bodiam, Robertsbridge, Etchingham and their neighbours on the Kent–Sussex border. Businesses added their own listings; villagers posted events and left messages — a good many of them family-history questions from people whose ancestors lived here.

When the site closed, that record went with it. This site restores it from copies held in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Every page is kept at its original address, so links made to it over the years still work, and the content is shown as the guide last recorded it rather than rewritten. There are 83 directory listings, plus the archived event diary and message board.

What is and is not current

Nothing here is live. A listing shows the details the guide held when it was last captured, and every page says when that was. Businesses have closed, changed hands and moved; phone numbers have changed; events are long past. Treat the directory as a record of the village in the 2010s and a starting point, not as a booking service, and confirm details with the business itself before relying on them.

Features that needed the old site's own database — accommodation availability search, booking enquiries, "add your listing", posting to the message board and user accounts — have gone. Their old addresses point to the nearest page that still exists.

Who runs it and how it is funded

This site is published independently in the United Kingdom. It is not run by Hawkhurst Parish Council, by the people who ran the original guide, or by any business or organisation listed on it. It is free to read and is funded by advertising served by Google AdSense. Advertising is labelled and does not change what any page says.

Corrections and removals

If a listing is for a business you own and you would like it amended or removed, or if you wrote a message-board post and want it taken down, please get in touch and name the page. Requests from the people concerned are acted on. The same goes for a photograph you hold the rights to.

The village, briefly

Hawkhurst is a village and civil parish in the borough of Tunbridge Wells, Kent, home to around 4,500 people. It is really two villages: the older one clustered around the large triangular green called the Moor, and Highgate to the north on the A268, where the shops, the Colonnade and the hotels are. Its name comes from the Old English for a wooded hill frequented by hawks; the Domesday-era records call it Hawkashyrst. It has been a Wealden iron-working village, a hop-growing parish, and — infamously — the home of the eighteenth-century Hawkhurst Gang of smugglers. The how to get here page lists the nearest stations and roads.