Four Counties
All images © Philip Edwards, 2025-2026, All rights reserved.
What started as a project to photograph the sunrise and sunset at Four Counties car park on Ashdown Forest ultimately became a 360°panorama that was accepted into the Gallery North exhibition ‘Flock’ in August 2026. The final image is shown below, along with a picture of me posing with the display at the top of the stairs in Gallery North, and the supporting text.
Ashdown Forest Panorama a 36″ x 14″ matte monochrome image
“Enjoy a 360° panorama across a timeless landscape via an image sliced into segments. We’re at Four Counties car park on Ashdown Forest, looking across land managed by the community using working practices extant for over 1000 years. In medieval times selective livestock grazing managed the land for the King’s sport; now it’s managed exactly the same way for everyone’s leisure and for the preservation of the rare and precious heathland.
Sweeping from left to right we start facing due North (to the left of the solitary tree) and move eastwards around the compass until returning to the same tree at the far end… a vista unfolds that witnessed the early development of radio technology; nurtured huge expansion of some communities whilst others have been lost; seen families grow in wealth and status whilst others decline; and a place that (literally) forged the birth of British iron making over 500 years ago, just 1.8 km north-west of our viewpoint.
An appreciation of tradition and community may ensure it continues for many more centuries, but those notions are as fragile as the habitat.“
