Ashdown Forest – exploring the real Hundred Acre Wood
Dr Sanjida O’Connell on the flora, fauna and animal and bird species that live in the woods that inspired Winnie-the-Pooh.
As we celebrate 100 years of Winnie-the-Pooh, award-winning writer and trained zoologist Dr Sanjida O’Connell (who also writes fiction as Sanjida Kay) took a trip to Ashdown Forest, the ancient landscape that inspired author AA Milne to create Winnie-the-Pooh’s home – the Hundred Acre Wood, which takes its name from Ashdown’s own Five Hundred Acre Wood.
The sound drifting towards me on the soft summer air is mechanical, a whirring and clicking, as if an automaton lurks in the woods below. I wait until I see it: and for a brief moment he’s there, cruciform against the smudged indigo of the darkening sky. A male nightjar churring at dusk, warning intruders that this is his and his mate’s territory. Nightjars, or fern owls as they were once known, are superbly camouflaged visitors from Africa, who hide by day and emerge at dusk and dawn. And this pair are nesting in a truly enchanted spot: Ashdown Forest, the landscape that inspired one of the world’s most loved children’s stories: Winnie-the-Pooh.
This year, 2026, marks 100 years since the first Winnie-the-Pooh book was published. After his death, the author, AA Milne, left a portion of his Winnie-the-Pooh royalties to the Royal Literary Fund as a legacy to support writers. I’m here as a writer who has been supported by the RLF to visit the places described in Milne’s books and poems, which have inspired generations of readers. And as a trained zoologist and rewilder, I’d like to see how these famous fictional spots, from The Hundred Acre Wood to the Heffalump Trap, have become a haven for wildlife.
Where I’m standing right now, watching the nightjar pair, is a steep-sided sandy heath. The first heather buds are beginning to show, pale and pink and pointed as ballet shoes; the scent of gorse is toasted coconut. All around me are heath-spotted orchids; tutus of taffeta-pink and burnt-magenta. Ashdown Forest is one of the largest open access-areas in south-east England. Two-thirds of its 6,500 acres is heathland, habitat rarer than a tropical rainforest and home to some of Europe’s most threatened species. And even though over 1.5 million visitors come here — it’s only 30 miles from London — it’s a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Here you’ll find exquisite fauna and flora, from Dartford warblers to silver-studded blue butterflies to lesser butterfly-orchids.
Milne moved here, buying Cotchford Farm on the edge of the Forest, in East Sussex, in 1925. “Cotchford took possession of us,” wrote his son, Christopher Milne in his memoir, The Enchanted Places. The surrounding jungle, fields, woods and streams became “the site of so many small adventures and happy memories”. It was here that Christopher, who was five when they moved, had adventures with his toys: his bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet and Eeyore. Perhaps because Milne was not good with children, according to Christopher, but was desperate to connect with his son, he started to tell him stories. As Christopher wrote:
“My father was a creative writer and so it was precisely because he was not able to play with his small son that his longings sought and found satisfaction in another direction. He wrote about him instead.”
Ash Walmsley, Head of Countryside for Ashdown Forest, gives me an insider’s guided tour. We visit Galleon’s Lap, Gill’s Lap Clump and Roo’s Sandy Pit, a disused quarry where baby Roo played before the other toys kidnapped him. I see Dartford warblers, singing on briars, male stonechats with their bracken-rusted breasts; skylarks soar overhead just as they did when Henry VIII hunted here and battles were waged over commoners’ rights to graze.
Ash takes me to see the herds of wild Exmoor ponies and gentle, cream-coloured ‘riggit’ Galloway cattle, which are stopping the furze and the scrub from taking over and are maintaining the Forest as a mosaic of open moorland with pockets of deciduous woodland.
We can’t leave, of course, without visiting Poohsticks Bridge, in Posingford Wood. Christopher used to come here to throw sticks over one side and watch them from the other as they floated awaydownstream. The moss-coated bridge spanning tea-brown water looks much as it did when EH Shepard first illustrated the Winnie-the-Pooh tales, although, thanks to the huge numbers of visitors trampling over it, it has had to be rebuilt twice.
“It is difficult to be sure which came first,” wrote Christopher. “Did I do something? And did my father then write a story around it? Or was it the other way about, and did the story come first? Certainly my father was on the lookout for ideas; but so too was I. He wanted ideas for his stories, I wanted them for my games, and each looked towards the other for inspiration.” He couldn’t recall whether, as a child he visited the bridge before or after his father’s story of it, but concluded, “In the end it was all the same: the stories became a part of our lives; we lived them, thought them, spoke to them.”
Today the Forest is owned by the Ashdown Forest Trust and managed by the Conservators of Ashdown Forest. That Ashdown Forest exists at all is in part thanks to Christopher, who, alongside the Ashdown Forest Trust, helped campaign against the land being sold for development in the 1980s. Hopefully, in another 100 years’ time, we will still be celebrating this glorious sweep of heathland, and the magical stories a father created about and for his son.
“Wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing.”
AA Milne, The House at Pooh Corner (1928).
Dr Sanjida O’Connell is an RLF Fellow and writes Wild Writing with Sanjida. She has had four non-fiction books, eight novels and several short stories published. She writes psychological thrillers as Sanjida Kay. Bone by Bone, The Stolen Child, My Mother’s Secret and One Year Later were published by Corvus Books; The Divide was published in The Book of Bristol by Comma Press; The Beautiful Game in The Perfect Crime, was published by Harper Collins; Grace’s Cave was released on BBC Radio 4 and Meat will be out shortly in Monster Capital (Comma Press).
Sanjida has been shortlisted for the BBC Asia Awards, the Betty Trask Award for Romantic Fiction, the Daily Telegraph Science Writer’s Award, Asian Woman of the Year, highly commended for BBC Wildlife Magazine’s Award for Nature Writing, long listed for a Crime Writers’ Association Steel Dagger, shortlisted for a CWA Short Story Dagger and has won a CWA Short Story Dagger.
Sanjida is currently serialising a nature memoir on Substack, Wilderness: In Search of Belonging, about growing up dual heritage in rural Britain, and rewilding a patch of land in Somerset.
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