Going On A Bear Hunt

As London’s V&A Museum prepares for a major exhibition, we follow the Winnie-the-Pooh trail in Ashdown Forest

- Amanda Hodges

The forest will always be there... and anybody who is friendly with bears can find it.” So AA Milne wrote of Ashdown Forest in The House at Pooh Corner and his words came true for this beautiful corner of East Sussex, which attracts everyone beguiled by the bear “of very little brain” and enormous heart who first appeared in print in the 1920s.

This ancient hunting forest is about to come under the spotlight once more as Goodbye Christopher Robin, a major new film charting Pooh’s evolution, is released, followed closely by an exhibition at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum examining the partnership between Milne and his illustrator, EH Shepard. Excitingly, the original manuscript of Winnie-the-Pooh, usually held at the Wren Library of Trinity College Cambridge (Milne’s alma mater), will go on display at the V&A for the first time.

Ashdown, a peaceful area of open heathland in the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, retains all the charm that led Milne, then a Punch humorist and writer of light drama, to pen his first book on the incorrigible bear with a penchant for honey.

The forest, a former royal hunting ground where deer still roam freely, is today divided into woodland and heathland, the latter being the home of many important animal and plant species, including nightjars, Dartford warblers, marsh gentians and three types of heather – plus, of course, indelible traces of Winnie-the-Pooh and his friends Tigger, Eeyore, Piglet and Owl.

Some fictional pilgrimages span vast areas, but the terrain inhabited by Pooh covers just 10 square miles. Back in 1924 when Milne’s first book of children’s verse When We Were Very Young appeared, he and wife Daphne bought 16th-century Cotchford Farm in Hartfield as their weekend country retreat, a refuge from their Chelsea home in London.