Ashdown Forest
Ashdown Forest is an ancient area of open heathland occupying the highest sandy ridge-top of the High Weald National Landscape. It is situated south of London in the county East Sussex, England. Rising to an elevation
of above sea level, its heights provide expansive vistas across the heavily wooded hills of the Weald to the chalk escarpments of the North Downs and South Downs on the horizon.
Ashdown Forest originated as a medieval hunting forest created soon after the Norman Conquest of England. By 1283 the forest was fenced in by a pale enclosing an area of. Thirty-four gates and hatches in the pale, still remembered in place names such as Chuck Hatch and Chelwood Gate, allowed local people to enter to graze their livestock, collect firewood, and cut heather and bracken for animal bedding. The forest continued to be used by the monarchy and nobility for hunting into Tudor times, including notably Henry VIII, who had a hunting lodge at Bolebroke Castle, Hartfield and who courted Anne Boleyn at nearby Hever Castle.
Ashdown Forest has a rich archaeological heritage. It contains much evidence of prehistoric human activity, with the earliest evidence of human occupation dating back to 50,000 years ago. There are important Bronze Age, Iron Age, and Romano-British remains. The forest was the centre of a nationally important iron industry on two occasions, during the Roman occupation of Britain and in the Tudor period when, in 1496, England's first blast furnace was built at Newbridge, near Coleman's Hatch, marking the beginning of Britain's modern iron and steel industry. In 1693, more than half the forest was taken into private hands, with the remainder set aside as common land. The latter today covers and is the largest area with open public access in South East England. The ecological importance of Ashdown Forest's heathlands is reflected by its designation as a Site of Special Scientific Interest, as a Special Protection Area for birds, and as a Special Area of Conservation for its heathland habitats. It is part of the European Natura 2000 network as it hosts some of Europe's most threatened species and habitats.
Ashdown Forest is famous for serving as inspiration for the Hundred Acre Wood, the setting for the Winnie-the-Pooh stories written by A. A. Milne. Milne lived on the northern edge of the forest and took his son, Christopher Robin, walking there. The artist E. H. Shepard drew on the landscapes of Ashdown Forest as inspiration for many of the illustrations he provided for the Pooh books.
Settlements
Ashdown Forest notably lacks any significant settlements within the large boundary defined by its medieval pale. There are however a number of villages situated on the edge of the forest adjacent to the pale or close to it. These include Nutley, Fairwarp, Danehill and Maresfield to the south and Forest Row and Hartfield to the north. The town of Crowborough abuts the forest on its eastern side while the town of East Grinstead lies to the north-west.Toponymy
Ashdown Forest does not seem to have existed as a distinct entity before the Norman Conquest of 1066, nor is it mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086. The area that was to become known as Ashdown Forest was merely an unidentified part of the Forest of Pevensel, a Norman creation within the Rape of Pevensey that had been carved out of a much larger area of woodland, the Weald, which itself was a part of the prehistoric forest cover of the British landmass, the British wildwood. The first recorded reference to Ashdown Forest by name is in the period 1100–1130, when Henry I confirmed the right of monks to use a road across the forest of "Essessdone", a right which the monks claimed to have held since the Conquest."Ashdown Forest" consists of words from two different languages. The first word, Ashdown, is of Anglo-Saxon origin. It is probably derived from the personal name of an individual or people called Æsca, combined with dūn, Old English for hill or down, hence Æsca's dūn—the hill of Æsca. It has no connection with ash trees, which have never been common given the soil conditions.
The second word, forest, is a term here used by the Normans to denote land that was subject to forest law, a harsh and much resented supplement to the common law that was designed to protect, for the king's benefit, the beasts of the chase, such as deer and wild boar, and the vegetation that provided them with food and cover. Forest law prescribed severe penalties, particularly in the 11th and 12th centuries, for those who transgressed, and for a time it governed large parts of the English countryside, including entire counties such as Surrey and Essex. However, while forest land was legally set aside by the crown for hunting and protected its sovereign right to all wild animals, commoners were still able to exercise—within strict limits—many of their traditional or customary rights, for example, to pasture their swine in the woods or collect wind-blown branches and trees. Thus, in the 13th century, the commoners of Ashdown were recorded as grazing large numbers of swine and cattle on the forest alongside the many deer that were kept for aristocratic sport and the provision of venison.
Note that forest does not have the modern meaning of "heavily wooded". Medieval hunting forests like Ashdown consisted of a mixture of heath, woodland and other habitats in which a variety of game could flourish, and where deer in particular could find both open pasture for browsing and woodland thickets for protective cover.
Shape and extent
Ashdown Forest is shaped, roughly speaking, like an inverted triangle, some from east to west and the same distance from north to south.The boundary of the forest can be defined in various ways, but the most important is that given by the line of the medieval pale, which goes back to its origins as a hunting forest. The pale, first referred to in a document of 1283, consisted of a ditch and bank surmounted by an oak palisade. in length, it enclosed an area of some. The original embankment and ditch, albeit now rather degraded and overgrown, can still be discerned in places today.
In 1693 the forest assumed its present-day shape when just over half its then was assigned for private enclosure and improvement, while the remainder, about, was set aside as common land. Much of the latter was distributed in a rather fragmentary way around the periphery of the forest close to existing settlements and smallholdings. Many present-day references to Ashdown Forest, including those made by the conservators, treat the forest as synonymous and co-terminous with this residual common land; this can lead to confusion: according to one authority "when people speak of Ashdown Forest, they may mean either a whole district of heaths and woodland that includes many private estates to which there is no public access, or they may be talking of the where the public are free to roam".
Most of today's common land lies within the medieval pale, although one tract, near Chelwood Beacon, acquired quite recently by the forest conservators, extends outside. The conservators have acquired other tracts in recent years as suitable opportunities have arisen, for example at Chelwood Vachery, as part of a policy to extend the amount of land that they regulate and protect within the pale. According to the definition used by the conservators, which relates to the land for which they have statutory responsibility, the area of Ashdown Forest is.
Geology
The underlying geology of Ashdown Forest is mostly sandstone, predominantly the Lower Cretaceous Ashdown Formation. This forms a layer varying from thick, consists of fine-grained, silty interbedded sandstones and siltstones with subordinate amounts of shale and mudstone. It is the oldest Cretaceous geological formation that crops out in the Weald.The Ashdown Formation has been exposed by the erosion, over many millions of years, of a geological dome, the Weald-Artois Anticline, a process which has left the dome's oldest layers, the resistant sandstones that form its central east–west axis, as a high forest ridge that includes Ashdown, St. Leonard's, and Worth forests. This forest ridge, the most prominent part of the High Weald, is surrounded by successive concentric bands of younger sandstones and clays, and finally chalk. These form hills or vales depending on their relative resistance to erosion. Consequently, what the viewer sees when looking north or south across the Weald from the heights of Ashdown Forest is a series of successively younger geological formations. These include heavily wooded lowlands formed on Weald Clay, the high Greensand Ridge escarpment that rises prominently to the north, and, on the horizon, the chalk escarpments of the North Downs and South Downs.
The Ashdown Formation is the lowest layer of the Hastings Beds, which comprise the Ashdown Formation, Wadhurst Clay Formation, and Tunbridge Wells Sand Formation, and which are now thought to be predominantly fluvial flood-plain deposits. The Hastings Beds in turn represent the oldest part of the series of Cretaceous geological formations that make up the Weald-Artois Anticline, comprising the Hastings Beds, Weald Clay, Lower Greensand, Gault, Upper Greensand, and Chalk. The anticline, which stretches from South East England into northern France, and is breached by the English Channel, was created soon after the end of the Cretaceous period as a result of the Alpine orogeny. Ashdown Forest is itself situated on a local dome, the Crowborough Anticline.
Much of the iron ore that provided the raw material for the iron industry of Ashdown Forest was obtained from the Wadhurst Clay, which is sandwiched between the Ashdown Sands and Tunbridge Wells Sands. Outcrops of Wadhurst Clay, which occurs as both nodules and in tabular masses, are distributed discontinuously in a horseshoe shape around Ashdown Forest, which has influenced the historical geography of iron-working around the forest.
Like the rest of the Weald, Ashdown lay beyond the southern limits of Quaternary ice sheets, but the whole area was subject at times to a severe periglacial environment that has contributed to its geology and shaped its landforms.