If you go down to Ashdown Forest this summer, you’re in for a big surprise.

This year marks the centenary of Winnie-the-Pooh, and shop shelves are filled with official merchandise featuring familiar figures from AA Milne’s stories and their Disney adaptations.

But a very strange and very original animal will be roaming around Hundred Acre Wood this summer, and it won’t look anything like Pooh, or Tigger, or Roo or Piglet or Eeyore.

The forest is maintained by The Ashdown Forest Trust, who soon realised, when it came to marking the centenary, that it needed to come up with a completely modern concept, without relying on AA Milne’s much-loved menagerie, whose images are tightly controlled. In partnership with Wealden District Council, the Trust hired events organiser Trigger to devise a contemporary celebration of the forest’s biodiversity, designed to encourage conservation and help visitors ‘absorb the magic of nature’.

Trigger, in turn, hired the multidisciplinary artist Jack Irving, whose impressive CV includes ‘wearable sculptures’ donned by celebrities such as Lady Gaga and Katy Perry, to dream up the event’s central motif, aided by over 100 drawings created by local schoolchildren. What he has created – an otherworldly hybrid creature inspired by the flora and fauna of the Forest, operated by ten puppeteers – sounds nothing short of remarkable.

We meet Irving on Zoom shortly before rehearsals begin for what he calls ‘The Creature’, a six-eyed creation roughly the size of a large minibus. This being, with inflatable ‘tails which become arms and arms which become tails’, which slithers like a snake, and struts like a peacock, will appear to visitors during two days of activities at the Ashdown Visitor Centre in mid-July, before touring other venues within the Wealden District.

Publicity material describes it as a ‘puppet’, though it is perhaps more akin to a surreal ten-person pantomime horse, its operators directing its many movements from within, with ‘fans and batteries and switches’ incorporated into their costumes. Its eyes will retract. Its inflatable arms and tails and face will shapeshift. It will ‘metamorphosise’ as it moves.

Which is apt: the creature is inspired by a variety of animals indigenous to Ashdown Forest, not least the silver-studded butterfly, a rare insect only found in one other UK habitat. There are also elements of the green tiger beetle, the dormouse, the nightjar, and the adder. ‘But when you see it,’ says Irving, ‘you’re not going to think of a single animal. It’s a weird, abstract thing. It could almost be from another planet.’ Its colour palette is far from alien, however, selected to fit in with its very specific sylvan setting: ‘the colours of bracken and gorse’.

Any references to Milne’s original work are oblique. ‘There’s maybe a nod to the weirder creatures in the AA Milne stories, like the Woozles,’ says Jack. ‘But only a nod. The Creature is very much its own animal: if I had to describe it in three adjectives, I’d say ‘curious, mysterious and ethereal’.

And educational, he might add. He certainly hopes the project will leave a positive legacy. ‘Everybody associated the Ashdown Forest with Winnie-the-Pooh, but the bottom line is that it’s an amazing woodland site that needs to be protected. And we’re all hoping that this project can help emphasise the need for nature conservation, not only in the older generation but in children and teenagers, too.’

AL

The Big One Hundred, with a programme of performances, workshops and discovery, will take place at the Ashdown Forest Visitor Centre, Wych Cross, Forest Row on July 18-19. It will subsequently tour four other venues within the Wealden District: Hailsham Town Centre (July 26); Sheffield Park and Garden (August 1); Uckfield Weald on the Field (August 8) and Herstmonceux Castle (August 22 – 23). The Hailsham and Uckfield events are free and non-ticketed. See thebigonehundred.co.uk for more details.