Poppet … more interested in devouring gorse than children. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian View image in fullscreen Poppet … more interested in devouring gorse than children. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian Stage Piglet, it’s a purple, psychedelic shapeshifter! The wild new creature prowling Winnie-the-Pooh’s wood Is it an alien? A dinosaur? Is it going to kill us all? Our writer hits Ashdown Forest for the Big One Hundred celebrations – and finds its magic enchanting new generations
Patrick Barkham Tue 23 Jun 2026 06.00 CEST Last modified on Tue 23 Jun 2026 06.06 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google T he 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.
View image in fullscreen Shapeshifter … one of Poppet’s 10 puppeteers. Photograph: David Levene/The Guardian “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 P…