Tilgate Park is a large recreational park situated south of Tilgate, South-East Crawley. It is the largest and most popular park in the area. Originally a part of the ancient Worth Forest, the park and adjacent areas (including the modern-day Furnace Green, Three Bridges, part of Southgate and Tilgate Forest) were part of the larger Tilgate Estate. Although visitor activity is mostly focused on the area surrounding Tilgate Lake and on the adjacent gardens of a former country mansion, a large area of the park is former silvicultural forest. This is now being managed as a Local Nature Reserve called Tilgate Forest. The park also contains the Tilgate Nature Centre featuring captive breeding of some vulnerable and endangered animal species and varieties. History Prehistory Worked flint tools of the Mesolithic "Horsham Culture" have been found in numbers in the park, including so-called "Horsham Point" arrowheads of the 8th millennium BCE. The major find-spot is now on the Golf Course, at TQ28593458. Geologically the park is on the Hastings Beds, dominated by sandstone with pockets of clay and iron ore. This produces poor, acidic and nutritionally deficient soils which, paradoxically, supported a varied natural plant cover. After the end of the Ice Age, especially after the extinction of the herbivorous megafauna, tree cover began to dominate the landscape from about 8500 BCE which marks the beginning of the Mesolithic Age. However, the vegetation of the High Weald, of which the park is a part, was more vulnerable owing to the poverty of the soils and so supported open woodland shading into grassland and heathland on high areas, with thick woodland confined to the narrow valleys. This landscape was very attractive to hunter-gatherer groups, who might have encouraged grassland and discouraged tree growth by summer burning of the former. The only evidence of activity by Neolithic (c4500 to c2500 BCE) farmers around the park have been two finds. The Mesolithic site on the Golf Course, mentioned above, also produced a polished flint axe. Also a polished arrowhead and broken polished axe were found in a field to the south of the park -the recorder thought that this evidence had ritual significance. In the following Bronze Age (c2500 to 800 BCE) a round barrow cemetery was established west of Pease Pottage on the ancient ridgeway running along the watershed above the park (now the set of roads from Horsham to Pease Pottage, Handcross