Information about Ashdown Forest

Ashdown Forest in the county of East Sussex, in South East England is a large open area of heathland together with pine, birch and oak woodland in the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is famous as the setting for the "Winnie the Pooh" stories written by A. A. Milne. There has been debate as to whether it should become a national park. Ashdown Forest is part of the what was once the great forest of Anderida, now known as the Weald.

Tourist Attractions

The Ashdown Forest Llama Park, which opened in 1987, is located in part of the Forest.

Winnie the Pooh

It is famous as the setting for the "Winnie the Pooh" stories written by A. A. Milne for his son Christopher Robin. Poohsticks Bridge, Galleon's Lap, Roo's Sandpit, the North Pole, the Hundred Acre Wood, Heffalump Trap and The Dark and Mysterious Forest can all be found on Ashdown Forest. Ashdown Forest was once a royal hunting ground and was originally protected by Act of Parliament in 1885.

Conservation

In 2007 the Forest was the centre of a dispute between some local residents and the forest's governing body, the Board of Conservators (who are working on behalf of the owners East Sussex County Council). The Board wish to return the area to as it was before the Second World War, a blend of heath and woodland, lost because "the advance of woodland into traditional heath areas after the Second World War, when returning soldiers gave up trying to scratch a living out of the forest. Whereas once hundreds of commoners used the wood and heath - their livestock obliging by chewing down young tree shoots - today there is only one commercial grazer."^[1] The residents complain that the results look like a First World War battle field. This is not a problem restricted to this common, but according to Jonathan Brown writing in the Independent on 21 April 2007 "similar debates are raging between locals and the authorities at other heathland areas in the New Forest and Surrey".^[1]

Trivia

A grey stone house in Ashdown forest was the home of Major Edward Dudley Metcalfe (1887-1957) the best friend and equerry of Edward VIII.

In 2001, was used for filming the HBO/BBC mini-series Band of Brothers.

The Forest was at one time home to a number of Red-necked Wallabies, the result of an escape from a captive colony in what was probably a farm. By the 1940s these were believed to be fully naturalised and breeding; numbers declined, however, and the last confirmed sighting was in 1972. Its importance to wildlife is recognized by its designation as a Special Protection Area. These wallabies, added to the fact that Christopher Robin owned toy Kangaroos, may have been the reason for Kanga and Roo.

In 2001 rare archival cine film footage, in the possession of the South East Film and Video Archive (now known[1] as Screen Archive South East), depicting a school pageant held in Ashdown Forest in 1929 came to public attention when details from Christopher Robin Milne's autobiography prompted a closer examination of the film, and it was discovered that a child clearly identifiable as him could be seen in it.

If anyone had asked me would this film exist I would have said no. Eighty per cent of the films from the 1920s have been lost. This is the only film we have of the Ashdown Forest from that period, so for this one film to be the film that also showed Christopher Robin was virtually impossible. ''-Frank Gray, Director of the South East Film and Video Archive[2]

This archival footage was shown in a documentary by the "Southern Eye" programme of the BBC Two television channel, which aired at 1930 hours GMT on Tuesday 27 November 2001. During the documentary, 10-year old presenter Joel Pitts navigated his way around Ashdown forest using a map of the "Hundred Acre Wood" drawn by E. H. Shepard (illustrator of the "Winnie the Pooh" books) and found that Roo's Sandy Pit, Galleon's Lap and various other landmarks can be located with it.

Further reading

• The forest's website
• The forest's tourist association's website
• Photographs
• designation as Special Protection Area
• Map sources for Ashdown Forest
• BBC News article, 27 November] 2001: Christopher Robin revealed] (describes the discovery of images of Christopher Robin Milne captured on the film of a school pageant held in Ashdown Forest in 1929).

Footnotes

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