Wedding Photographer Ashdown Park — Victorian Gothic Hotel in A.A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood
Ashdown Park Hotel is a Grade II listed Victorian Gothic mansion set in 186 acres of woodland in the Ashdown Forest at the centre of East Sussex — the ancient Wealden forest that inspired A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh stories, written while Milne lived at Cotchford Farm a mile to the south. The hotel’s Victorian Gothic railway-hotel architecture — the turreted central tower, the steeply pitched gabled wings and the walled Italian garden — provides a wedding photography setting of considerable Victorian romantic character, and the surrounding Ashdown Forest provides one of the most famous and personally resonant landscapes in English children’s literature for couples who choose to extend their portrait walk into the forest itself. For Ashdown Park wedding photography, the forest is as important as the building.
The Hotel, the Italian Garden and the Croquet Lawn
Ashdown Park’s formal grounds include a walled Italian garden of considerable formality, a croquet lawn with views across the forest to the south, a kitchen garden of productive character and the approach drive through ancient Himalayan cedar and Douglas fir specimen trees. The hotel’s south-facing terrace above the Italian garden provides a formal architectural portrait platform with a view over the garden’s formal structure and the forest canopy beyond. The Victorian Gothic detail — the carved stone window surrounds, the iron-covered spire above the central tower and the ornamental chimney stacks of the main range — provides decorative architectural detail available for close portrait work at any point around the building’s exterior.
Ashdown Forest, the High Weald and the Hundred Acre Wood
The Ashdown Forest itself — the 6,500-acre ancient heathland and woodland of the High Weald, one of the oldest deer-hunting forests in England, now managed as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty — provides portrait settings that range from open heather moorland on its highest ridges to ancient oak woodland on the lower slopes. Pooh Bridge (Posingford Bridge, where A.A. Milne’s Poohsticks game took place) is within the forest and is accessible from Ashdown Park by a forty-minute woodland walk that provides a sequence of natural forest portrait opportunities en route. The wider High Weald — the medley of ancient woodland, hop garden, tile-hung farmhouse and sandstone village that defines the Sussex/Kent border landscape — provides broad countryside portrait settings at any direction from the hotel.