In Pooh’s footsteps
Ashdown Forest, just 40 miles from London, has been enticing visitors for years. But its most famous inhabitant was a bear of very little brain
Literary Britain has many sacred groves. There's Wordsworth's Lake District and the Brontë sisters' Yorkshire. You cannot visit Bath without reminders of Jane Austen, or Fleet Street and overlook Dr Johnson. Outside London, Warwickshire is actually signposted on the M40 as "Shakespeare Country". In Dorset there's no end of local pride in the novels of Thomas Hardy. Tolkein's "shires" are to be found all across the Midlands, though perhaps only a Hobbitomane would know that. Finally, there's the little world of AA Milne, whose estate derives millions worldwide from the antics of Winnie-the-Pooh. The adventures of this infuriating teddy bear and his juvenile partner, Christopher Robin, took place in the Home Counties amid the domestic acres of Ashdown Forest, a symbolic haunt in the landscape of the English mind.
We British love our forests, as the Coalition has discovered, even though these woods cannot begin to compare with their leafy equivalents in Bavaria or California. In the UK, we have five principal forests, but only one, the New Forest, really cuts the mustard. The others – the Forest of Dean, plus Savernake, Nottingham and Ashdown Forests – occupy a special place in the national imagination, which gets all misty about "the greenwood tree" and its psychic connection to our inner daemon. "Wood" in medieval English has the secondary meaning of "mad": Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream complains of being "wood within this wood". Still, whether decorous or demented, most of our English woods will surely be a horrible disappointment to a visiting jungle dweller from, say, the Amazon.
Ashdown Forest, scarcely 40 miles from London, is not remotely crazy; it's just one of the best-kept secrets of the southeast, but it's really more of a heath than a wood. Dating almost to the Norman Conquest, perhaps it has never fully recovered from the devastation wrought by the great hurricane of 1987. Still, at just over an hour's motoring from the city, it has its own mystery and magic.
First of all, it's not that easy to find. The simplest method is to head south towards East Grinstead and follow the A22 towards the High Weald. Now you begin to step back in time. Ash trees and hazel crowd the roadside; here and there carpets