Ljs: In Pooh's footsteps

Ashdown Forest, just 40 miles from London, has been enticing visitors for years. But its most famous inhabitant was a bear of very little brain

Literary Britain has many sacred groves. There's Wordsworth's Lake District and the Bront� sisters' Yorkshire. You cannot visit Bath without reminders of Jane Austen, or Fleet Street and overlook Dr Johnson. Outside London, Warwickshire is actually signposted on the M40 as "Shakespeare Country". In Dorset there's no end of local pride in the novels of Thomas Hardy. Tolkein's "shires" are to be found all across the Midlands, though perhaps only a Hobbitomane would know that. Finally, there's the little world of AA Milne, whose estate derives millions worldwide from the antics of Winnie-the-Pooh. The adventures of this infuriating teddy bear and his juvenile partner, Christopher Robin, took place in the Home Counties amid the domestic acres of Ashdown Forest, a symbolic haunt in the landscape of the English mind.

We British love our forests, as the Coalition has discovered, even though these woods cannot begin to compare with their leafy equivalents in Bavaria or California. In the UK, we have five principal forests, but only one, the New Forest, really cuts the mustard. The others ? the Forest of Dean, plus Savernake, Nottingham and Ashdown Forests ? occupy a special place in the national imagination, which gets all misty about "the greenwood tree" and its psychic connection to our inner daemon. "Wood" in medieval English has the secondary meaning of "mad": Lysander in A Midsummer Night's Dream complains of being "wood within this wood". Still, whether decorous or demented, most of our English woods will surely be a horrible disappointment to a visiting jungle dweller from, say, the Amazon.

Ashdown Forest, scarcely 40 miles from London, is not remotely crazy; it's just one of the best-kept secrets of the southeast, but it's really more of a heath than a wood. Dating almost to the Norman Conquest, perhaps it has never fully recovered from the devastation wrought by the great hurricane of 1987. Still, at just over an hour's motoring from the city, it has its own mystery and magic.

First of all, it's not that easy to find. The simplest method is to head south towards East Grinstead and follow the A22 towards the High Weald. Now you begin to step back in time. Ash trees and hazel crowd the roadside; here and there carpets of spring bluebells glow within the green cave of the bosky canopy. In the days of Chaucer and the Canterbury Pilgrims, these parts would have been wild and thickly wooded ? a perfect medieval hunting ground.

Today, the spirit of Merrie Englande, which was fairly bogus at the best of times, has morphed into the classic, well-groomed Home Counties' respectability of sober driveways and suburban laurels; and Ashdown Forest itself has become reduced to about 10 square miles of open-access countryside, an EU Special Area for Conservation. Its bracken, gorse, sandy tracks and scattered pines still exude a sense of immemorial tranquillity.

The main "forest" lies below the highest ridge of the High Weald which you can reach, by car, along the B2026. Up here, on a bright spring day, with azure sky, fluffy white clouds and the nip of a fresh wind coming over the Downs from the sea, it's hard to imagine that one of the world's greatest metropolitan centres is just beyond the horizon. The middle distance is a blur of blue-remembered hills; even the silver jets cruising lazily into Gatwick are far above the sandy tracks, pine and gorse of Gills Lap, which is where the B road will take you.

Geographically the heart of Ashdown, Gills Lap has an additional significance for the many hikers and bicyclists who sweat and grunt up the final furlong of the sharp ridge road. Look east from this windswept vantage point with an Ordnance Survey map to hand, and you can locate a "Five Hundred Acre Wood" on the far side of the valley below. But Ashdown Forest is a country of the literary mind as well as of cold co-ordinates. So the map is only half right. To one little English teddy bear this was, rather, "the Hundred Aker Wood". At Gills Lap you might not know it but you have arrived at the world centre of the Winnie-the-Pooh racket, a multi-million pound business still in roaring, recession-proof good health.

But because we are in the Home Counties it's a trade that dare not speak its name. Mercifully ? because not everyone can warm to the celebrated teddy bear and his winsome posse (Piglet, Roo, Eeyore, Owl and Christopher Robin) ? the guardians of an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) have prevented the landscape from becoming blighted by AA Milne memorabilia. It takes no effort of the imagination to picture what this site would have become in America. Here, on a Sunday morning in March, the most obvious commercialism is a Mr Whippy van.

Ashdown Forest is closely controlled by the environment police. There are no pubs, though the delightful Hatch Inn comes close to trespassing on hallowed ground. If you want to stay on the edge of the forest, there's the Ashdown Park Hotel. Really the first evidence of 21st-century concerns comes with the directions to the "llama park", shortly before a sign recording 238 "deer collisions" in 2010. Otherwise you can indulge a forest fantasy, listen to the sound of skylarks and stonechats, and regress to the England of the 1920s. Further down the road, you'll soon find a lay-by named "Piglets". Ah, AA Milne?

Between Gills Lap at the top of the High Weald and the little village of Hartfield on the northern edge of the forest lies Cotchford Farm, whose other former owners include the Rolling Stone Brian Jones. The bestselling writer AA Milne, formerly a Punch journalist, bought the property in 1925 as a suitable place to bring up his six-year-old son Christopher, known to the family as "Billy Moon". Milne used to walk up from the house to Gills Lap with Billy Moon trotting beside him as he strode across the heath in his thick socks and heavy walking shoes.

When, on Christmas Eve 1925, the London Evening News announced a new story by AA Milne, the acclaimed author of When We Were Very Young, it was advertised as "a new story for children about Christopher Robin and his Teddy Bear". At this date, only two of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories had been completed, but there was no shortage of inspiration to hand, and Milne was a quick worker. The toys in Billy Moon's nursery included Eeyore, Piglet and the bear named Pooh (a literary critical subculture has sprung up to explain the origins of the name, and for the best summary of Milne scholarship, read Ann Thwaite's exemplary biography). To these, Kanga and Roo were swiftly added. Milne wrote fast. By March 1926, Winnie-the-Pooh was complete.

All the book needed now was some illustrations. Enter EH Shepard, known as "Kipper". Eager for publication, Milne immediately invited the artist down to Cotchford to see for himself where the stories had been set. Shepard made a point of drawing from life whenever possible and was keen to see the setting for the "Pooh" stories.

This might seem odd to us. The landscape of Ashdown Forest is hardly referred to in Milne's writing, yet in his imagination it takes place beneath a real sky on the heath, and under the pine trees, of the forest. Milne and Shepard tramped over to Gills Lap and saw, as Christopher Robin had, and visitors can to this day, "the whole world spread out until it reached the sky". The site is marked now by a discreet bronze plaque, a memorial to their unique collaboration. The view can hardly have changed in 100 years. Walking back to the Gills Lap car park on this, the gentlest of walks, the visiting Pooh-natic can pass both "The Enchanted Place" and the site of the celebrated "Heffalump Trap" next to six pines. These have become reduced by 20th-century wear and tear to a solitary Lone Pine. From "Roo's Sandy Pit" you can cross the B2026 and follow for a few hundred yards the winding route pioneered by Christopher Robin in his quest for "the North Pole". Somewhere to the right of this whimsical landmark is "Eeyore's Sad and Gloomy Place", described on more conventional maps as Wrens Warren Valley.

On the morning of the Observer's visit to this hallowed site, the magic and mystery of Pooh's landscape was somewhat overshadowed by the appearance, five abreast, of a Hell's Angel chapter, heading in the direction of Brighton's seafront. No matter: Ashdown Forest has been here for hundreds of years and will no doubt endure, timeless and unspoilt, for aeons to come. In 2011 it exhibits an impressive reluctance to collaborate with the Milne industry. In an age of literary commercialism, it comes as a relief to find that the Pooh trade has not been allowed to colonise Ashdown Forest. It would be nice to think that the authorities are exercising good taste, but perhaps a baser shame is the dominant instinct. What could be more blush-making than a literary historical association with a teddy bear?

Disney's Winnie the Pooh is in cinemas from 15 April

Robert McCrum

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