The South Downs Way: Winchester to Eastbourne, described in both directions

ROUTE SUMMARY TABLE

INTRODUCTION

The start to a bright spring day… striding through a gentle downland valley with the delightful name of Cricketing Bottom, settling into that easy comfortable rhythm so essential to the full enjoyment of a long walk. The early sun warm overhead, my first cuckoo of the year calling from the hillside, the smoky haze of bluebells lining scrub-crowded slopes where the blackthorn produces haloes of flower. Only the pheasants complain. Larks rise singing, and all around swell the Downs. Within less than an hour I’ll be on their crest. Within that hour I’ll be wandering alone save for the peewits and skylarks and hares, save for the cowslips at my feet and the orchids in the spinneys. Alone with the faintest of breezes and huge views that have the sea gleaming in one direction, and the vast tartan plain of the Weald in the other. Hour upon hour wandering through history, past burial mounds and hill forts left by the first wanderers of this Way, on land that once was covered by sea but is now serenaded day by day by minute specks of birds whose land this really is, on grasslands grazed by slow-moving fluffs of sheep, the close-cropped hillsides darkened now and then by the sweeping shadows of clouds. Cloudshadows – the only impatience on the South Downs Way.

Jevington, midway between Eastbourne and Alfriston

More than two decades have passed since I first walked the South Downs Way, but I have been back several times, drawn by the visual delights to be won from the crest of this southern backbone of land with its overwhelming sense of space and peace, whose trails seem to wind on for ever – towards a dim, blue, never-to-be-reached, horizon. And each time I tread that smooth baize of turf and look north across the empty Weald, I find it hard to believe that this is the ‘overcrowded’ South of England.

This South is a surprisingly secret land, though its secrets are there to be unravelled if one only cares to look. It is misjudged and often maligned, and walking through and across it is the only way properly to discover its truths, for by wandering these ancient footpaths one absorbs its essence through the soles of the feet. The cyclist and horse rider will also develop an affinity with the land, but without the direct physical contact known by the walker, a unique part of the experience will be missing.

Celandines bank the trails with gold in April and May

Along the South Downs Way your field of vision expands with the miles to a greater knowledge of the land. The traveller begins to appreciate that it is not so populous as is generally thought, that its countryside is infinitely more varied than might previously have been considered possible of the lowlands, and when you gain the scarp edge it is the panoramic expanse which throws into disarray any preconceived notion that mountains have a monopoly of landscape grandeur. Here the perspective fits. Scale is adjusted and beauty comes from order. In a world of constant change there is something reassuring in a vast acreage of countryside that somehow survives without too many scars – another eye-opener for the rambler in the South.

The view from Firle Beacon

There are other surprises too, but these must be left for the wanderer, cyclist and horse rider to discover for him or herself, for along the South Downs Way any journey is bound to be full of rewards. Journeys of delight, journeys of discovery.

None but the walker can possibly understand the full extent of that statement, for it is only by the slowing of pace that one finds the ability to become part of the landscape itself. This is not something that may be achieved from the seat of a motor vehicle, for motoring divorces you from the land, and at a speed which blurs and distorts. Along country footpaths, however, there is so much to experience – from the succession of soil types beneath your feet to the nuance of every breeze that plays sculptor to the passing clouds. One breathes the fragrance of wayside plants, discovers the life of hedgerow and woodland shaw, and drifts through an unfolding series of panoramas. With senses finely tuned to the world about you, a footpath becomes a highway of constant discovery, of constant delight.

The Downs

In the distant mists of time, during what is known as the Cretaceous period – that is, from about 100 million to 70 million years ago – the land we now know as the Weald lay beneath the waters of a warm, shallow sea whose bed was covered by a sandwich of sedimentary deposits. Miniscule shell-bearing organisms settled on this bed, the pure calcium carbonate of their shells powdering to a chalk dust that built with staggering patience to a depth of just one foot every 30,000 years or so. (Consider the time-scale required to produce the chalk cliffs of Beachy Head – over 500 feet/150m deep!) Yet this layer of soft crumbling chalk, composed of all these tiny shells, stretched from the Thames Valley to the Pas de Calais, and reached a depth of around 1000 feet/300m, while into this white cheese-like rock there also settled the skeletons of sea sponges to form hard seams of flint.

The quintessential South Downs – on Hyden Hill above the Meon Valley

Then, about 20 million years ago during the Tertiary period, came the continental collision which built the Alps. Italy was thrust into Europe and Spain was pressured from the south. Mountains were slowly buckled and, as with a stone tossed into a pond, ripples spread in all directions. The chalk of southern England was raised into a huge dome rising from the sea and stretching for about 125 miles (200km), end to end. Weathering followed – a process that continues to this day. Rain, ice, frost, all combined to nibble away at this dome, aided and abetted by rivers and streams that found a weakness when the chalk cracked as it buckled. The outer edges of the dome were the last to crumble, the central core being carried away in watercourses that flowed through it. The centre of that lost dome is now the Weald, the outer edges the North and South Downs.

Rivers and streams continue to drain the Weald, breaching the Downs in valleys far broader than they now require, while dry knuckle coombs within the heart of this downland tell of streams that no longer exist.

Rambling along the smoothly rounded South Downs today we may wonder at this triumph of geological history. Gazing from the clifftop at Beachy Head we see the body of the land exposed, carved through as though with a gigantic scalpel. We gaze into the heart of unfathomable time, at the crushed, bleached remnants of creatures whose sacrifice is our gain.

East of the coastline, as the route of the South Downs Way leads away from the sea, that sacrifice is forgotten as we amble across grasslands rich in wild flowers. Yet beneath our boots the chalk lies deep, waiting only for the plough to expose its weaknesses to the wind. Where the path leads through arable land we see polished flints littering the fields, the chalk cushion around them turning to dust under the influence of sun and wind, ready to be brushed away. The heights of the Downs shrink in the summer breeze – one more act of sacrifice by creatures that long ago gave their shells to the southern landscape.

Drifts of wood anemones carpet both woodland and shaw

The common perception of the South Downs is one of rolling, flowerdazzled grasslands trimmed by sheep. This is partly due to the influence of our neolithic ancestors who crossed from continental Europe some 5000 years ago and settled here, raising animals, clearing trees and growing crops. Until their arrival the hills would have been forested, but they, and the Iron Age settlers who arrived more than 2500 years later, cleared the forests for both agricultural purposes and for fuel, creating the open spaces that are such a feature of the eastern and central Downs today. The Romans too farmed the downland for corn, and grazed their animals on the rich meadows, but following the arrival of the Normans there was a growth in the population of villages and towns snuggling at the foot of the hills, and the number and size of flocks of downland sheep grew as a consequence. From the 14th century on the area was very heavily grazed, reaching a peak 500 years later when the eastern Sussex Downs alone supported more than 200,000 ewes and lambs.

With the Second World War the nature of downland began to change once more, and in the aftermath of hostilities vast acreages were turned by the plough for the production of grain. Today the wanderer will experience a mixture of pasture, arable and woodland, a contrast that consists of meadows dancing with cowslips and the sharp golden dazzle of oil-seed rape, of yellow-headed wheat in summer and the lush foliage of beech and birchwood, of blackthorn scrub and blotches of gorse. Yet from a distance, from the low-lying Weald, the view is as Margaret Fairless Dawson (writing under the pseudonym of Michael Fairless) described it in The Roadmender: ‘lean grey downs, keeping watch and ward between the country and the sea’.

The South Downs Way

Remaining within the South Downs National Park for almost its entire length, the official South Downs Way leads for 100 miles (160km) between Eastbourne and Winchester, following the northern escarpment for much of the way and rarely descending to habitation except where river valleys interrupt the regular course of the Downs. Opened in 1972, the South Downs Way originally finished in Buriton, near the Sussex–Hampshire border, but by the end of 1987 proposals for an extension to Winchester had been approved by the Secretary of State for the Environment.

The South Downs Way was the first National Trail to be developed as a bridleway throughout its entire length. In a few places the bridleway and footpath routes diverge but, apart from the initial (eastern) stage between Eastbourne and Alfriston, these are temporary alternatives only, and by far the majority of the Way is shared by ramblers, horse riders and cyclists.

South Downs Way noticeboard at the start of the route in Eastbourne

For the greater part of its length the Way follows the northern crest of the South Downs escarpment, with broad views overlooking low Wealden farmlands as well as the rolling Downs. Nestling between downland hills to the south are the clefts of dry valleys, called ‘bottoms’, or ‘deans’. Beyond them in the eastern sector sparkles the English Channel, but further west the nature of the landscape changes and there is less a sense of height and space, and the sea is all but a memory.

Five rivers (in Sussex these are the Cuckmere, Ouse, Adur and Arun, with the lovely Meon in Hampshire) have cut valleys through the chalk, and the South Downs Way descends into – and climbs out of – them with fairly steep paths or tracks. Mostly though the route remains along the crest, sometimes on clear trackways, sometimes on flint paths, sometimes on the soft luxury of turf, and for a good part of the way it remains more than 650 feet (200m) above sea level. In the eastern half the Downs are open and exposed, but towards Hampshire woodlands become more frequent. Throughout, the quality of the route is first rate, with paths and gates well maintained and waymarking almost everywhere superb.

History is an ever-present companion to the route, for as we have seen, the crests of the Downs were long ago used by nomadic tribes as convenient highways above the dense forests and mire of the Weald. Neolithic man began to cultivate them and to mine for the flint from which he made tools. In the Bronze and Iron Ages primitive farm sites, long barrows and hill forts began to pepper the ridges, and their tell-tale signs are there to this day – although modern farm practices have destroyed evidence of a number of these in recent years. Along the route of the South Downs Way there are something like 400 Bronze Age burial barrows. There are lynchets (ancient field systems) dating from the Iron Age, rippling grass slopes where ploughed land long ago slipped against the original small field boundaries of piled stone. At Butser Hill, south of Petersfield, an Iron Age site reveals three defensive dykes, lynchets, burial mounds and ancient trackways.

The South Downs Way easing through Queen Elizabeth Forest

During the Roman occupation routes of trade and communication were engineered across the South Downs, and so advanced were their methods of construction that some of these have been adopted as modern rights of way. In places the long-distance walker uses tracks that were laid in the first century

BC

, and west of Bignor Hill