Mayfield

In the local version of the legend, St Dunstan was at his forge in Mayfield when he grabbed the devil’s nose with his tongs; the pair are on the village sign. The Archbishops of Canterbury kept a palace here, and its great hall of about 1310 is now part of Mayfield School. The High Street has tile-hung and timber-framed houses from about 1400 on, and a raised pavement on the north side built to keep people out of the mud. The Grade I Middle House, now a hotel and pub, has a richly decorated timber-framed front, rare in the south-east. Mayfield, in the High Weald, was a centre of the Wealden iron industry in the 1500s and 1600s.