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Ashdown Forest
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Ashdown Forest is in the county of East Sussex, in South East England is an open area of of heathland together with pine, birch and oak woodland in the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is famous as the setting for the "Winnie the Pooh" stories written by A. A. Milne. There has been debate as to whether it should become a national park. Ashdown Forest is part of the what was once the great forest of Anderida, now known as the Weald.
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Encyclopedia
Ashdown Forest is in the county of East Sussex, in South East England is an open area of of heathland together with pine, birch and oak woodland in the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. It is famous as the setting for the "Winnie the Pooh" stories written by A. A. Milne. There has been debate as to whether it should become a national park. Ashdown Forest is part of the what was once the great forest of Anderida, now known as the Weald. Locations in the forest have been used for filming Television programmes and films, such as HBO/BBC's mini series Band of Brothers.
Forest use and conservation
Ashdown Forest was first enclosed as a royal hunting park in the thirteenth century. The "pale" fence enclosed an area of over 50 square kilometres within which red and fallow deer were hunted . The forest was used for deer hunting by King Edward II of England. Iron has also played an important role in the history of the area.
During the 1800s the people living in and around Ashdown forest grazed their animals in the forest, and regularly cut the bracken, heather and gorse (called the "litter") to use as fuel for burning and thatching on building roofs and animal pens. On 13 October 1877 John Miles was cutting litter on Ashdown Forest on behalf of his landlord Bernard Hale, barrister, J.P, Deputy Lieutenant of Sussex, and Ashdown commoner. William Pilbeam, one of Earl De La Warr's keepers, told him to stop cutting. Miles refused, thus initiating the Ashdown Forest case, brought by Reginald Sackville, 7th Earl De La Warr, as Lord of the Manor of Duddlewell against Hale and Miles, to test the extent of Hale's right to use the forest's common land.
In 2007 the Forest was again the centre of a dispute between some local residents and the forest's governing body, the Board of Conservators (who are working on behalf of the owners East Sussex County Council). The Board wish to return the area to as it was before the Second World War, a blend of heath and woodland, lost because "the advance of woodland into traditional heath areas after the Second World War, when returning soldiers gave up trying to scratch a living out of the forest. Whereas once hundreds of commoners used the wood and heath - their livestock obliging by chewing down young tree shoots - today there is only one commercial grazer." The residents complain that the results look like a First World War battle field. This is not a problem restricted to this common, but according to Jonathan Brown writing in the Independent on 21 April 2007 "similar debates are raging between locals and the authorities at other heathland areas in the New Forest and Surrey".
Another dispute, this time from cyclists, is the lack of cycle routes over the forest. Whilst horse riders can roam the 130km of trails over the forest the same rights have not been extended to the growing number of cross country cyclists. Notices have been posted to enforce the 'no cycling' by-law, which makes cycling on the forest a criminal offense, relating to the supposed erosion caused by the activity; in fact the very authority posting these notices at public expense has acknowledged that erosion is not the issue, just that it's easier to use the excuse than admit fear over inability to manage and control an activity.
The Forest was at one time home to a number of Red-necked Wallabies, the result of an escape from a captive colony in what was probably a farm. By the 1940s these were believed to be fully naturalised and breeding; numbers declined, however, and the last confirmed sighting was in 1972. Its importance to wildlife is recognized by its designation as a Special Protection Area and a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).
Tourist attractions
Gills Lap
Gills Lap (at ) is a roundel of fir trees located on the site of an Iron age fort at the top of Ashdown Forest. It appears in the Winnie the Pooh books as "Galleons Lap" or the "Enchanted place". A stone axe, dated to 50,000 years BC. was found near here.
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