The inspiration behind Winnie-the-Pooh’s famous Hundred Acre Wood

COVERING 2,500 ha, Ashdown Forest spans a sandy ridge 700 feet above sea level in the High Weald AONB in East Sussex. Once a medieval hunting ground, the pale fencing surrounded some 5,300 ha of forest. In 1693, over half of the land was divided and sold into private hands, with the remaining 2,500 ha retained as common land. Now a landscape vaguely triangular in outline, it has been managed by the Conservators of the Ashdown Forest since 1865.

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This forest has an illustrious and industrial past: remains of Bronze Age, Iron Age and Romano-British settlements abound, as does evidence of Britain’s first iron and steel works. These works harnessed the abundant local resources: extracting iron ore from the sand and clay; cutting broadleaf timbers for charcoal in smelting; using the watercourses to drive the furnaces and forges, until the 17th century, when this industry moved elsewhere.

Friends Clump, a plantation of Scots pine. (Image: FJ)

The term ‘forest’ can mean different things, depending on the historical age being talked about. Today, this landscape includes the largest area of uncultivated open-access forest in the South East, 60 per cent heathland and 40 per cent semi-natural woodland, valley bogs, streams and ponds. Designations include a site of special scientific interest (heathland ecology), a special area of conservation (heathland habitat) and a special protection area (birds, including the nightjar – surveyed in June to ensure numbers support the designation – and the Dartford warbler). In 2006, the land was supported by the largest grant awarded in the South East under the Higher Level Stewardship Scheme.

Under successive grant schemes, the Conservators continue to manage the forest towards securing National Nature Reserve status.

The Forest Centre at Coleman’s Hatch sits in a cool, wooded glade. Three renovated barns surround a grassy meeting space. A yard behind the ‘Office’ contains vehicles used by Forest Rangers and a wood store holding logs used to generate heat for the barns. Beside the Visitor Centre, a ‘Forest Wildlife’ board highlights what has been found in the area, and a solar power information indicator details the total kilowatts generated and CO2 saved.

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In 2016, the forest received 1.4 million visits, with numbers increasing during the pandemic. ‘Open space’ was cited as the main draw.

Ashdown Forest website has a range of walks of varying lengths and degrees of ability, catering to a variety of interests: archaeology; industrial history (mining); modern military history; fiction. It makes the rare claim of being probably the only forest in England that boasts a bear. Author A. A. Milne lived here and locations found in his Winnie-the-Pooh books are highlighted on at least two walks. 

Of the 75 miles of public footpaths available, we select two walks, one being the 1 km ‘Short Pooh Walk’ loop, which begins with a scene from a toddler’s fantasy. A bright-orange, tracked 360 digger hunkers silent by piles of fresh-cut gorse (clipped at ground level and the stumps then removed).

Eye-level branches of path-side silver birch have been tied back around the stem. (Image: FJ)

Moving on, Pooh’s ‘Enchanted Place’ (or ‘Galleons Lap’) at ‘the top of the forest’ is so named because no character could say with certainty whether there were 63 or 64 trees growing in the only place to sit without prickly vegetation. In reality, it is an amenity plantation of Scots pine known as ‘Gills Lap Clump’.

The ‘Heffalump Trap’ (a sandy dip) is near ‘Lone Pine’, which may or may not be the sole survivor of the ‘Six Pine Trees’. On this occasion, Lone Pine provides a landmark from which to navigate a brief solo ‘expotition’ (expedition) – not to find the North Pole (as Pooh and friends did), but through a vegetative ravine too intriguing to ignore.

Once back out in the open, a ‘Walk Amongst Friends’ is a welcome follow-up.

Back along the High Weald ridge, patchworks of heathland, woodland, warrens and pasture fall away towards the hazy South Downs. Slanting sun shards illuminate the early spring roadside colour, verdant heath grasses pockmarked with dark molehills, burnt-amber bracken, tufty heather and hip-high gorse thickets punctuated with stinging-yellow flowers. Brashy white-stemmed birch branches rattle in the breeze.

The ‘Friends’ of the walk’s title refers to the ‘Friends Clump’, planted in 1973 to commemorate the Year of the Tree.  Now numbering 12, planting these clumps first began in 1825, most likely to provide habitat for black grouse, as ordered by the then ‘Lord of the Manor’, Elizabeth, Countess de la Warr, whose descendants finally sold off the forest freehold in 1988. Initially, locals saw these native conifers as interlopers and cut them down. Latterly featuring in E. H. Shepard’s illustrations for the Winnie-the-Pooh books, they are now considered iconic.

Winnie the Pooh counting Painted Lady butterflies outside his house in Hundred Acre Wood (Image: PA)

Towards the ‘Friends Clump,’ the start and end of our 2.8 km circular walk, signage states that in medieval times ‘forest’ was a legal term referring to a Royal Hunting Park surrounded by a pale (ditch-and-bank boundary), in which special powers of protection were given to deer for monarchs to hunt as sport. Henry VIII would have set out from his hunting lodge at Bolebroke Castle. 

The wide main ride carves the semi-dormant secondary woodland of birch (with some willow) in two, revealing a structure of the stems and last year’s birds’ nests. (Image: FJ)

Ashdown Forest’s heathland is an ancient habitat preserved and maintained by human activity. Under common law, the forest pale contained 34 gates and hatches, allowing tenant farmers access to exercise their right to graze livestock, collect birch, alder and willow firewood, and to cut heather and bracken for animal bedding.

In the 17th century, repeated attempts to reverse the Rights of Common and enclose the whole forest met with fierce local opposition. In 1693, the forest was divided almost in half, with the centre sold into private ownership for ‘improvement’ (exploitation by private interests). Outlying areas, near farms and villages, were left as common land.

These are the areas accessible to visitors today.

Forest bye-laws are stringent and many, enforceable by the Conservators of the Ashdown Forest, under powers conferred to them by the Ashdown Forest Act of 1974. 

The Act is the result of the ‘Great Ashdown Forest Case’, when a lawsuit brought by the 7th Earl de la Warr (contesting the nature and extent of Rights of Common on the Forest) was settled in favour of the commoners. Establishing a Board of Conservators (1885) to protect those rights (and bye-laws) culminated in the Act of 1974.  In 1988, East Sussex County Council bought the forest land and placed the freehold in a newly established charitable Ashdown Forest Trust, created to protect the forest in perpetuity.

Beneath canopies of approximately 100 50-year-old Scots pine trees, the ground is dry, littered with cones and long brown pine needles. From the far side of the Friends Clump, a wide welted ride (firebreak) leads downhill. A sign, ‘Windmill’, offers a diversion along a modest path through a copse.

Nutley Windmill, thought to be 300 years old, is the last working ‘open trestle post mill’ in Sussex. It is difficult to find out what was milled here, the site being open to the public only on Wednesday. Instead we admire the neat continuous-weave Hazel fencing and willow hurdle gates surrounding the private property opposite.

Back through the copse, a silver birch stem supports a large burr and the forest floor is intentionally littered with decomposing branches. Between shorter holly shrubs, a girthy oak straddles a low bank, part of an old boundary ditch-and-bank system separating the forest from private properties.  

The wide main ride carves semi-dormant secondary birch (with willow and alder) woods in two, revealing the structure of stems and last year’s birds’ nests. Of the 1,000 ha of woodland, some areas are still managed through commoners exercising their rights of estovers and cutting firewood. Although coppice stands have not been actively worked for years, when in rotation, coppiced sweet chestnut would have provided fencing material, with alder coppice providing a base for tracks in wet areas. Today, as well as commoners taking firewood, any trees that are removed go for heating the Forest Centre’s boiler, and it has been known for the ranger team and volunteers to cut Scots pine regeneration for sale as Christmas trees as part of the heathland restoration. 

Woodland cover drops and thigh-high bracken provides an orange foil for the green exuberance of naturally regenerating Scots pine. (Image: The Argus)

With five holly trees on our left, the track descends steeply to the valley bottom and then loops right.  Woodland cover drops and thigh-high bracken provides an orange foil for the green exuberance of naturally regenerating Scots pine.

A short cut back to the main path involves tiptoeing across boggy ground to avoid glossy fronds of hard fern and the wet stars of sphagnum mosses. Back at the woodland edge, the long view is of short gorse clumps and grasses punctuated with twisted pine.
The UK contains a fifth of the world’s heathland (58,000 ha according to the Woodland Trust), with Ashdown Forest containing two per cent of this. This open landscape is one of the forest’s main draws, yet it is far more crowded today than it was in 1947, when 90 per cent was heathland.

Since 2000, bracken has been mowed, the Rhododendron ponticum cleared and saplings cut. Grazing livestock is again promoted as part of heathland management policy. The HLS grant funding awarded in 2006 commits the Conservators to maintaining 60 per cent heathland cover and returning the site to ‘favourable condition’.

On the steep final push a dog walker sees us taking photos and stops for a lengthy chat, offering further insights: a Scots pine clump on the eastern horizon, Kings Standing, where Henry VIII watched ‘sport’ unfold. England’s first blast furnace was established at Newbridge in 1496; the ‘Airman’s Grave’, a memorial (to the crew of an RAF Wellington plane that crashed nearby in July 1941), is a short walk away from where we have parked; that in this forest, ‘Rights of Common’ pass through property (731 households) and as owner herself, she could graze 30 sheep, six cattle and a mill horse, if she had them.

A bright orange tracked digger with grab hunkers silent beside piles of fresh-cut gorse and Scots pine. (Image: FJ)

She could be a ‘Friend of Ashdown Forest’ (a charity established in 1961 to raise funds through talks and events), such is the breadth of her knowledge. After an informative 20 minutes, this local continues her way downhill.  Invigorated by the conversation, we visitors stride back up the slope to ‘Friends’. 

www.ashdownforest.org