Ashdown Forest circuit (Vanguard Way to Five Hundred Acre Wood)

Walked by Sally and Richard, Sunday 27th August 2017

4.7 miles of walking, about 2 miles on the Weadway and a short distance on the Vanguard Way

For all photographs taken today clear here

Note that this was the first leg we walked on the Wealdway and we completed the walk from here to Gravesend before completing the southern section, hence we walked this leg 14 months before the one which is described immediately before it.

Richard knows Ashdown Forest well but I hardly know it at all; after this lovely walk I'm wishing we'd explored it more over the years when visiting his parents in nearby Hartfield. It's a beautiful place, with landscapes familiar from A.A. MIlne's "Winnie the Pooh" books and in particular from Ernest Shepard's illustrations. A.A. Milne lived nearby and the real Christopher Robin was his son. Ashdown Forest, formed on a sandstone ridge, was an ancient hunting forest and now comprises a mix of open heathland, complete with heather, gorse and bracken and occasional pine trees, and more substantial areas of mixed woodland.

We were down in Sussex to check that Richard's parents' house in Hartfield was OK, but we wanted to do something a bit more enjoyable, especially since it had turned into a lovely bank holiday Sunday, if slightly warm for walking. We parked at the Gill's Leap car park TQ467315 and set off walking around 11.30 am. The Wealdway and the Vanguard Way cross on Ashdown Forest, and from the car park we took the Vanguard Way south to the point where it intersects with the Wealdway, from where we headed north-east on a track marked as a Roman Road.

From the map, the route across the Forest looks straightforward, but with many more paths than shown it was sometimes not entirely clear and the signposting was not particularly good (there was an occasional rather old wooden "WW" sign, usually after we'd found the right route) though to be fair it is probably the case that many of the paths would have brought us to the right place, and a particularly tricky left hand fork was well signposted. After walking across lovely open heathland we entered the wooded "Five Hundred Rough", just on the edge of Five Hundred Acre Wood (which became 100 Acre Wood in "Winnie the Pooh"). We took a short diversion into the wood for lunch, sitting on the trunk of a tree that is no longer standing.

After lunch we continued through Five Hundred Acre Wood to its northern edge. Here the route of the Wealdway turns right but we turned left, following a descending track through the trees to a bridge over a meandering stream; Richard's recollection is that he and his family used to believe that they had found the original "Wol's House" somewhere here, but as befits a tree that was rotten and fell down in the story, there is no sign of it now! We climbed up a muddy track to the road and turned left through Chuck Hatch.

We eventually climbed to the memorial to A.A. Milne and E.H. Shepard, apparently a place loved by Milne and so by Pooh. We think we can remember Richard's Mum coming to the unveiling of the memorial (By Christopher Robin Milne, then a grown man) with her brownies. It is quite amazing to us that the "Pooh-mania" has grown up so recently; when Richard was a boy they worked out the "Pooh locations" for themselves - now there is a map telling you where to go and somehow the magic is lost. Anyway, from the memorial it was just a short stroll to Gill's Lap ("The Enchanted Place"), replanted following the gales in 1986, and which we walked right round looking for our car park before realising we had to keep straight ahead.