Ashdown Forest

Ashdown Forest is an ancient expanse of open heathland on the highest sandy ridge of the High Weald National Landscape. It lies 48 kilometres south of London in East Sussex, rising to 223 metres above sea level. From its heights, wide views stretch across wooded hills to the chalk escarpments of the North Downs and South Downs on the horizon. The forest occupies a roughly triangular area about 11 kilometres from east to west and north to south. It is surrounded by villages such as Nutley, Fairwarp, Danehill and Maresfield to the south, Forest Row and Hartfield to the north, Crowborough to the east and East Grinstead three kilometres to the north-west. The forest began as a medieval hunting ground after the Norman Conquest. By 1283 a 37-kilometre pale of ditch, bank and oak palisade enclosed 52 square kilometres. Thirty-four gates and hatches in the pale allowed local people to graze livestock, collect firewood and cut heather and bracken. Henry VIII hunted here and had a lodge at Bolebroke Castle in Hartfield. The forest also holds evidence of human activity going back 50,000 years, including Bronze Age, Iron Age and Romano-British remains. It was twice the centre of an important iron industry, first during Roman times and again in the 15th century when England’s first blast furnace was built near Coleman’s Hatch. More than half the forest passed into private hands in 1693, but 25 square kilometres remained common land, the largest open-access area in South East England. Visitors walk across heathland, woodland and remnants of the old pale. The common land offers wide open spaces for walking, with paths leading past Bronze Age burial mounds and old iron-working sites. The forest inspired A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood and provided landscapes for E. H. Shepard’s illustrations of Winnie-the-Pooh. Signs of its past use remain in place names such as Chuck Hatch and Chelwood Gate. The heathland is protected as a Site of Special Scientific Interest and part of the European Natura 2000 network. From higher points, views extend across the Weald to the distant chalk hills.