The rolling idyll of heath and forest, spinney and stream that gave us the Heffalump, the Woozle and, most famously of all, Winnie-the-Pooh, has a new fantastical resident. Creeping through the bracken, making strange cooing and purring noises, is a shapeshifting creature with a huge tubular nose and eyes inspired by adders. It shimmies with iridescent patches and the psychedelic purple of flowering heather in high summer.
Poppet, a puppet made by costume designer Jack Irving and brought to life by a team of 10 award-winning puppeteers, is performing for schoolchildren in Ashdown Forest, East Sussex. The primary school class squeal with delighted fear as the purple apparition transforms itself from caterpillar to bird to munching monster in sinuous moves.
“What is it?”
“It’s an alien!”
“They are dinosaurs.”
“Dragons.”
“We’re going to die!”
The children don’t sound very scared. And Poppet is more interested in devouring gorse and bracken than the young humans who are all-too-rarely found playing in the forest in the modern era.
This spectacular puppet is the centrepiece of the forest’s Big One Hundred celebrations, a free festival commemorating a century of Winnie-the-Pooh, the story that brought to life – and probably saved – the largest patch of open countryside in south-east England. The puppet and the festival have been created by Trigger, an outdoor arts charity that has dreamed up similarly epic performance puppets such as The Hatchling, a human-operated dragon the size of a double-decker bus that led Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee in 2022. And there is purpose behind the performance: to encourage children and especially families not so familiar with the countryside to connect with the wonders of wild, free nature.
“I love these deep mystical ideas that come to you in childhood and you can’t shake and you’re magnetised to visit these places. Putting a narrative on to a natural landscape gives it a mystical edge,” says Angie Bual, creative director of Trigger, who collaborated with local school children to devise Poppet. This is the first time Bual has seen Poppet in action, in Ashdown Forest. “Theatre and outdoor arts really can change place, change memory of place and change value of place. To have the puppet in this beautiful landscape – it looks so much better than on stage. But it also makes the landscape change. If you think about Winnie-the-Pooh’s toys, that’s what Christopher Robin was doing. He put his toys against the tree and then the story just unfolds. Having something different in a natural space gives it that magic.”
AA Milne has done more than anyone to imbue the 2,500-hectare Ashdown Forest with magic. The author of Winnie-the-Pooh may have been a superlative comic writer, whose Pooh, Piglet and friends are an enduring delight for children of all ages a century on, but together with illustrator EH Shepard, he also evoked the beauty of the landscape where he lived and roamed with his son, Christopher Robin. Later in life, Christopher Robin returned to Ashdown Forest when it was under threat in the 1980s and helped save it, with the extensive heath owned by the local council and, like many commons, managed by a committee of “conservators” as a common and nature reserve today.
The fact that the hills and heaths of Ashdown Forest would be recognisable to Milne is remarkable when London is 35 miles away and the south-east has witnessed such intensive development over the past century. Its heaths are still home to special species, including the silver-studded blue butterfly, adder, nightjar and Dartford warbler. The first bird I hear calling when I arrive is a cuckoo, all too rare in southern England today.
Another rarity is children playing in the forest. Unaccompanied roaming in nature is not part of modern childhood. Rather than simply recreate a nostalgic yearning for Christopher Robin’s lost 1920s upbringing, the Big One Hundred looks forwards, seeking to spark new stories and ignite new connections with the natural world. There are Ashdown attractions that directly serve Winnie-the-Pooh fans, including the Pooh Corner coffee shop, the Pooh Sticks bridge and guided walks but creating a 100th anniversary celebration directly derived from Milne and Shepard felt too “rigid,” says Bual. “Young people are ready for a different story and if you really want that to happen, doing a Beatrix Potter style event won’t really captivate these people and get a diverse audience.”
Poppet’s performances in the forest see it shift “through a carousel of natural creatures” as Bual puts it, from caterpillar to crab to bird and then plant. “Creating a completely different creature is quite hard to do – to not simply have the head of a bird and the tail of an adder,” she says. Thinking about it all, “I was having somewhat trippy dreams last night.”
She and Trigger were determined to create an open-ended character, upon which children can project their own fantasies: “The improvisation of the mind can take over.” For Bual, such a character or spectacle in nature can help people notice more natural marvels around them. “Nature has to compete with bowling, swimming, climbing. It’s quiet, it’s difficult, it’s subtle. We know it does so much for our wellbeing and restoring our batteries but it’s so polite about it, it’s easy to forget it when you’re away from it,” she says. “We’re just giving it a bit of a boost.”
Another way Ashdown Forest has changed since Christopher Robin’s childhood is that many more trees have grown up on the heathland. It has changed from 90% open heath to 60% with a decline in traditional livestock grazing by commoners.
People love trees and Beth Morgan, head of engagement and development at Ashdown Forest, says one of their biggest challenges is cutting down some of the new trees to maintain the lowland heath, an increasingly rare habitat upon which species such as nightjar and Dartford warbler depend. “We often get the question, ‘Where are all the trees? Why are you taking the trees out or the gorse out?’ When you explain to people, they usually understand. That ongoing engagement with visitors so they know why we are doing what we’re doing is so important.”
And so Poppet’s performances include a gentle educational element: the monster eats gorse and bracken and the audience will be able to “feed” it. The puppet will imbue what is a fairly mundane conservation message with “a sense of excitement,” hopes Bual. “When you have a playful creature embodying that need to control gorse and bracken, you’ve got the message.”
Ashdown Forest has 1.5 million visitors each year but it is widely recognised that visitors from deprived inner cities and communities of colour are less likely to frequent the British countryside. Alongside Poppet, the Big One Hundred celebrations curated by Trigger include a set of badges for children to collect by participating in nature-based activities, alongside crafting, storytelling and yoga. Transport is being provided to bring global majority groups and disabled-led groups to the forest.
As a British Asian, Bual says she is aware that spending time in nature is “just not instilled in everyone’s culture”. When she goes for a country ramble with her dad, she says, he’s always asking: “Where is it?” or “Where is the coffee shop?” “Sometimes you need a destination or an event like this and then you can go down a path and remember that there is fun and joy to be had everywhere. That was what Christopher Robin’s original experience was. Will the Christopher Robins of the future protect these precious places? It needs passion. It needs you to feel like the space belongs to you, for you to really want to save it.”
Bual hopes the mystical, perplexing Poppet will ensure children experience the kind of “super-joy” in nature that will motivate them to nurture it for the next century. “When the puppet came into the forest today, the kids screamed with laughter and emotion. You’re telling kids that nature means happy-happy-happy. Culture is a quick way to make sure you all had a great time today. Those kids will now know they love Ashdown Forest. That’s what makes a place like this a natural treasure, a local treasure or ‘this belongs to me’. It’s emotional anchoring.”
And what does Bual think Winnie-the-Pooh would make of Poppet the puppet? “I think he’d be wise about it,” she smiles. “He’d tell Piglet that he knew all about it all along.”