A new film is putting Pooh playground Ashdown Forest on the map
As Goodbye Christopher Robin is released, Hannah Stephenson follows the trail of AA Milne and his son with biographer Ann Thwaite.
There’s no shortage of British locations which have become well-trodden tourist paths thanks to their celebrated authors – Haworth for the Bronte sisters, Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, Wordsworth’s Lake District.
Ashdown Forest
But just 40 miles from London, Ashdown Forest in East Sussex – where scenes from the film Goodbye Christopher Robin were shot and where Winnie-the-Pooh creator AA Milne and his son Christopher Robin had their happiest times – has remained blissfully unmarred by tourism.
On the Pooh Trail
Ann Thwaite
Today, AA Milne’s biographer Ann Thwaite, the film’s consultant, is helping me retrace the steps that father and son took in the 1920s on their many walks along this 10 square mile stretch of countryside, the little boy carrying his eponymous bear and his innocent pals Piglet, Tigger, Rabbit, Kanga, Roo, Owl and Eeyore.
Yet there’s not a sign, a playground, or any hint of a Disney-esque homage to the most famous bear in the world in sight, as we venture into this gloriously untouched ancient forest, much of which is tranquil, open heathland.
Anyone who doesn’t know of Ashdown Forest’s connection with Winnie-the-Pooh or his creator will be little the wiser once in the ‘Hundred Aker Wood’ which is in reality called the Five Hundred Acre Wood.
A forest untouched
Gills Lap
Ann, a sprightly 84-year-old and expert on all things AA Milne, takes fans on the paths trodden by the most lucrative children’s author in the world.
“I always get lost,” she confesses. “You see groups of scouts doing orienteering, but there’s no little model of Winnie-the-Pooh in every corner guiding them.
“The landscape hasn’t changed in all those years,” she continues. “You can’t even hear any traffic. It’s very sandy, too. There’s a scene in Winnie-the-Pooh when Roo is playing in a sandpit, and if you look at the books you can see where Shepard (illustrator EH Shepard) was drawing the actual place.”
She leads us to a shady circle of pine trees in Gills Lap (renamed Galleons Lap in the books), in Milne’s words an ‘enchanted place’ which is apparently popular with fans, but there’s no one here today.
Just out of the trees, there’s the most spectacular view from the High Weald of the Downs, a patchwork quilt of green fields, divided by forest, with hardly a trace of visible civilisation.
Domhnall Gleeson as Alan Milne and Will Tilston as Christopher Robin Milne
It’s where AA Milne took his son on walks for precious time out and where he later took his illustrator, Ernest Shepard, who recreated Ashdown as the background in the Pooh books.
On the rock where they sat – and where the actors who play them are featured in the film – there’s a commemorative plaque to AA Milne and EH Shepard who ‘captured the magic of Ashdown Forest’.
The famous Pooh bridge
The most visible sign that we are in Pooh territory is a wooden signpost to Pooh Bridge, which features in the film. Here we stand, twigs at the ready, chucking the thin wooden sticks in the river – a tributary of the Medway – before darting to the other side to see whose twig appears first.
Christopher Milne, who died in 1996, did much for the restoration of the bridge, Ann recalls.
“He also led the fight to save the forest from development and oil exploration. He said he took the playground of his Sussex childhood with him wherever he went.”
Today, the area is highly protected, Thwaite observes, which is why there is no housing in the forest. The only sign of any building is the odd version of Eeyore’s house in the woods, made from twigs and branches by those obviously on a family day out.
In the open heathland, rugged sandy paths are bordered by swathes of purple heather and zingy yellow gorse and bracken, while in the wooded areas, tall pine rub shoulders with chestnut, birch and oak.
“The whole thing is a celebration of outdoor play and imagination,” Ann enthuses. “Christopher Robin, the real boy, was very keen on climbing trees. Trees were a very important part of his life and the great outdoors was a great therapy for Milne when the whole of England was trying to recover from the effect of war.”
A family affair
Eeyore’s house
Indeed AA Milne, a successful playwright, had been a casualty of the First World War, suffering shellshock at the Somme. He bought a rural retreat at Cotchford Farm, on the northern edge of the forest, to aid his recovery and would spend weekends and holidays there with his glamorous wife Daphne and Christopher Robin, who they always called Billy Moon.
The film shows that the most intimate moments of Milne’s relationship with his son were spent in the forest, where they would play cricket, fish and create adventures – and the game of Poohsticks – in this exciting open space.
But their relationship struggled after the Winnie-the-Pooh books were published in the 1920s and became huge bestsellers. Christopher Robin had wanted his father to write a story for him, not about him. He unwittingly – and unwillingly – became more famous than his dad and hated the attention he attracted.
He was bullied terribly at school because of the Christopher Robin link and resented everything connected with Winnie-the-Pooh, including his father, who didn’t protect him from the excesses of publicity.
While everything around them changed, the forest remained the same. And any tacky trace of the Winnie-the-Pooh multimillion-pound empire still remains pretty invisible in this neck of the woods.
The Pooh Corner shop sign at Hartfield
Only when you come upon the quaint village of Hartfield do you enter Pooh tourism territory, a swinging silhouette of Pooh outside its twee village shop selling a mass of Pooh memorabilia.
Back at Gills Lap, sitting on that famous rock overlooking miles of field and forest, the last word must go to AA Milne.
“Sitting there, they could see the whole world spread out until it reached the sky.”
The Press Association
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