playing pooh sticks

Today I went with Stuart and our downstairs neighbour, David, on a 14-mile circular hike from Ashurst station into Ashdown Forest, where AA Milne lived and set his Winnie the Pooh stories. This is supposed to be the pooh sticks bridge. If you looked down the river about twenty feet, all the pooh sticks had created a sort of accidental beaver dam looking thing.

The landscape didn’t look anything like I’d expected. I was thinking it would be a typically English lush green forest, with moss and bluebells just starting to come out. We started out in that, but at Ashdown Forest, suddenly we came over the hill to a sort of rugged landscape of pine trees, gorse bushes and sandy soil like you’d get on a Hawaiian beach. Even the climate felt slightly different, much drier. Totally bizarre. We finished with some very nice pints in the Anchor Pub in Hartfield, then tottered back to the train station.