Morghew Park has much to offer production companies as a large and versatile outdoor location in mid-Kent, less than two hours from London.

In Summary …

The Estate comprises about 2000 acres, or three square miles, of unspoilt Kentish countryside, currently operated as a commercial arable farm. The landscape is split between traditional Wealden upland (small fields, hawthorn hedges and oak trees), descending steeply in places onto classic marshland (larger fields, dykes and willow beds). Included in this is about 200 acres of mature woodland, most of which is well accessible using all-weather farm and forestry tracks.

The Estate can offer the following facilities, in no particular order:

Public Rights of Way

The middle portion of the Estate has more than a square mile of country with roads, but no buildings or public rights of way, making it suitable for action filming involving pyrotechnics, and so on. Also, none of the woods on the Estate are hampered by rights of way.

Steam Trains

The Estate is crossed by the Kent and East Sussex Railway, a heritage steam railway running from Tenterden in Kent to Bodiam in East Sussex. The railway itself is regularly used as a location, with details available at www.kesr.org.uk/film-location. The Estate adjoins the railway, on both sides of the track, for about a mile and a half, offering excellent opportunities to film and photograph moving trains for long periods of time. While the Estate’s land on the western side of the railway is broadly flat, on the eastern side the land rises steeply, allowing trains to be filmed from high ground. Think some of the footage in ‘The Railway Children’.

Woodland

The Estate’s 200 acres of woodland is almost exclusively broad-leafed, and is well served by roadways. While some of the woods (Ten Acre Wood and Upper Collington) are broadly flat, most of the remainder have deep gullies incorporating carefully mown grass rides. Overall, the woodland is split between well-managed compartments alongside unmanaged and relatively wild areas.

Shoot

Morghew Park is home to The Morghew Shoot. Full details of this are available elsewhere on this site. The Estate possesses all the paraphernalia associated with pheasant rearing, such as pens, incubators etc. During the pheasant season (October to January), it is able to stage driven shooting for the cameras.

Farming Operation

Morghew Park has all the facilities you’d expect from a modern arable Estate. Combine harvesters, tractors, sprayers, as well as two army lorries – a 1950s ex-US army REO Whistler and a 1968 Mercedes Benz Unimog 404S. In addition, there are 1970s Atcost buildings, potato storage, modern grain storage as well as old-fashioned grain storage. Think the violence at the end of ‘The Witness’.

Water and Fishing

The Estate has two adjoining reservoirs with a combined area of five acres, as well as several lakes and about five miles of riverbank on two minor Kentish watercourses, the Newmill Channel (formerly the River Ashbourne) and the Reading Ditch. The reservoirs contain carp, and the lake holds pike to 32lbs.

Enquiries

To discuss any of this or to visit, please call Tom Lewis on 07802 609 661. Please note that access restrictions apply to any film and photo location work, and access to the land for this purpose is exclusively from the Estate’s new grain store, located on the A28 adjacent to Rolvenden Station. The postcode here is TN17 4JP.