Ashdown Forest in East Sussex is famous for serving as inspiration for the Hundred Acre Wood, the setting for the Winnie-the-Pooh stories written by A. A. Milne. Milne lived on the northern edge of the forest and took his son, Christopher Robin, walking there. The artist E. H. Shepard drew on the landscapes of Ashdown Forest as inspiration for many of the illustrations he provided for the Pooh books.

Most of the familiar locations from the books can be found at Gill’s Lap (Galleon’s Leap in the books). To reach it, one must walk along a Roman road that slices through the forest across open heathland, surrounded by heather, bracken and gorse. This richly historic landscape is ancient indeed: a stone axe found close to the Roman road dates from prehistoric settlers 40,000 years ago.

The forest is still home to a protected herd of fallow deer, as well as to Scots pines, a cluster of which served as the base camp for our friends’ adventures in the books.