Thankyou for your comments so far! I had a look through some photos from your suggestions and I wonder if it is cherry. It will have been an English tree cut down from the essex area as it was just a log cut up from some felling from my fathers golf course.
I found this photograph on another forum which looks sort of similar
I'm inclined towards cherry. For comparison, here is some English cherry (on the left in each photo) alongside some chestnut (on the right). Cherry bark is very distinctive so if you have some bark offcuts it should be decisive.
Annoyingly I took the bark off and threw it away at the start, I would say from the photo above that it does look more like the cherry on the left. It has a very fine grain.