South Downs Way

The South Downs Way is a hundred miles of chalk, and chalk is the whole story. It holds no water on the surface: there are no streams on the tops, no ponds, nothing to fill a bottle from between the four river valleys that cut the ridge. The rain goes straight through it into the aquifer below, and the turf on top dries out within an hour of a downpour. This is why the Way is walkable in February, why the going is fast, and why the National Park has had to put taps along it. Fill up at every one.

It was the first long-distance bridleway in the country, opened in 1972 and pushed west to Winchester in 1989, and it is still open to horses and bikes for the whole of its length. You will share it. On a summer Saturday between Devil's Dyke and Ditchling Beacon you will share it with a lot of people; on a Tuesday in Hampshire you might not see anyone for an hour.

It begins at the City Mill, where the Itchen leaves the old city under the walls, and for the first few kilometres it is not obviously going anywhere in particular: a lane, a field edge, a golf course. Then it climbs to Cheesefoot Head, and from the rim of that great hollow the character of the next thirty kilometres is laid out. Hampshire's downs are broad rather than sharp. The fields are big and arable, the woods are frequent, and the scarp — the steep north face that defines the Sussex stretch — has not yet made up its mind. The walking is easy and the views are long and rather uneventful, and there is a pleasure in that which the busier miles ahead will not offer again.

At Exton the Way drops to the Meon, the first of the rivers and the only one in Hampshire: a clear chalk stream in a valley of thatch and flint. The climb out goes over Old Winchester Hill, which is a hillfort, a nature reserve, and a fine place to eat lunch in a bank of orchids, and then along a high ridge past the fenced remains of a naval signals school to the flank of Butser Hill. The Way does not go over Butser. It skirts the summit and drops into Queen Elizabeth Country Park, which has a cafe and a car park and, on a warm weekend, the first crowds of the walk. The trig point at 270 metres is a short pull up to the right, and it is the highest ground you will stand on all week.

Somewhere on Harting Down you cross into West Sussex, and the downs change. The ridge narrows. The scarp arrives, a long green wall dropping away to the north, and the Weald opens up below it as a patchwork you will be looking at for the next four days. On the crest itself the turf is short and studded with flint, and the wind, which was a breeze in Hampshire, becomes a factor.

Beacon Hill is the first real test of the pattern that will repeat all the way to Eastbourne: a dry valley in the way, and a path that goes straight down into it and straight back up the far side rather than round. The hillfort on top is one of a chain along the ridge, most of them now no more than a ring of low banks in the grass, and the Way passes through or beside half a dozen of them without any fuss.

What follows is the quietest and most wooded stretch of the whole route. The scarp here is hung with beech — hangers, in the local word — and for long stretches the path runs through them in a green light with nothing to see but trunks, before breaking out onto open down and dropping into a gap. Cocking is one such gap, a village with a road through it and a bus to Midhurst. Andy Goldsworthy left a line of chalk boulders in the valley below it in 2002, and they are slowly weathering back into the ground, which was the idea.

Then Graffham Down, then Bignor Hill, where Stane Street crosses. The Roman road from Chichester to London runs over the ridge as a raised bank you can still walk along, dead straight, indifferent to the contours in a way the Way itself never is. Bignor Roman Villa, with the best mosaics in the south, is in the valley below and worth the detour if you have the legs.

And then the ridge simply ends, at a steep nose above Amberley, and you go down off the chalk for the first time since Exton to cross the Arun. This is the biggest of the four rivers and the flattest of the four valleys: the Wild Brooks spread out to the north, the old chalk pits beside Houghton Bridge hold a museum of industry, and Amberley, just upstream, has a castle, a pub, and a station on the Arun Valley line, which makes it the easiest place on the western half of the Way to get to or away from.

The climb out of the Arun valley is long and gets the ridge back under you in one go, and from Kithurst Hill onward the Way is what most people picture when they picture the South Downs: an open whaleback of grass, the scarp on your left, the sea somewhere to the right beyond a band of lower downs, and a chalk track running ahead of you to the horizon.

Chanctonbury Ring is visible for an hour before you reach it. The clump of beeches on the hillfort was planted in 1760 and became the most recognisable landmark in Sussex, and then the storm of 1987 took most of it down in a night. The replanting is a generation from catching up. From the Ring, Steyning is directly below, the Weald runs away to the North Downs, and on a clear day the Isle of Wight sits on the western horizon.

The Adur, the second river, is crossed at Botolphs, a hamlet of a church and a few houses in the flat of the valley, with the A283 close enough to hear. The climb out goes over Truleigh Hill, which has a youth hostel, a farm and a row of radio masts, and is the last quiet ground before the downs get busy.

Because from Truleigh the ridge runs straight at Brighton. Devil's Dyke is the deepest dry valley in the country and a Victorian pleasure ground — there was a cable car across it and a funicular up it, and there is still a pub on the rim and a bus from the city — and on a fine day the path along its edge is a promenade. The valley itself is extraordinary. The crowds are the price, and they are worth paying once.

Saddlescombe, in the gap beyond the Dyke, is a farm the National Trust runs as a working one, with a donkey wheel that used to draw the water. Then the Way crosses the A23 at Pyecombe, which is the loudest minute of the walk, and climbs back to the crest past the two windmills at Clayton. Jack is the black tower; Jill is the white post mill; they are visible from most of the ridge behind you and most of the ridge ahead.

Ditchling Beacon, at 248 metres, is the highest point in East Sussex and the crux of the walk for anyone who has come up from Brighton for the afternoon. The Way runs along the scarp top here with the whole of the Weald below it to the north, and on a clear day the North Downs are a blue line thirty kilometres away across it. The path is wide and chalky and full of bikes.

East of the Beacon the crowds thin quickly. The ridge runs on over Blackcap, past a trig point and a small wood, and then starts to lose height toward Lewes, which appears below with its castle and its gap in the downs. The Way swings south to avoid the town, crosses the A27 on a bridge, and climbs the last of the western ridge above Kingston before dropping, at length, to the Ouse.

Southease is the third river and the gentlest of the crossings: a swing bridge, a church with one of the three round towers in Sussex, and a station on the Seaford branch line two minutes off the path. If you need to leave the Way, or join it, this is where.

The climb from the Ouse up Itford Hill is one of the steeper pulls on the route and delivers you onto the last stretch of the inland ridge, and it is the best. Firle Beacon is 217 metres with a Bronze Age barrow on the summit and the sea, now, unmistakably on the right — not a glint beyond lower hills but the real thing, grey or blue, with Newhaven's breakwater and the ferry in it. The scarp on the left is at its steepest and cleanest here, the Weald at its widest. Firle village and its park are directly below.

Bo Peep and Bostal Hill follow, with the same shape and the same views, and then the ridge drops for the last time to Alfriston in the Cuckmere valley. Alfriston is a village of one street, with a green, a big church, and the Clergy House beside it: a fourteenth-century Wealden hall that the National Trust bought in 1896 for ten pounds, the first building it ever owned.

At Alfriston the Way divides. The bridleway route, for the horses and bikes, stays inland over Windover Hill, past the Long Man of Wilmington cut into the turf below it, and comes down through Jevington to Eastbourne. The footpath route follows the Cuckmere south to the sea. The line on this site is the footpath route. The Cuckmere is a small river that meanders extravagantly, and the last of it, from Litlington down to Exceat, is walked on a floodbank with the loops of the old channel on either side, cut off from the water in 1846 and silting up quietly ever since.

From Exceat the Way climbs straight out of the valley and the land runs out. What is left is thirteen kilometres of chalk cliff, the highest on the south coast, and the walk ends by going over all of it.

The Seven Sisters are the brows between seven dry valleys that the sea has cut into. There is no path along the cliff edge that does anything but climb and descend: up to Haven Brow, down, up to Short Brow, down, and so on to Went Hill and the drop to Birling Gap. Each brow is higher than the last set of steps suggests, and there is no shelter on any of them. The edge is unfenced and undercut, and the turf runs right up to it. Everyone stays further back than they meant to.

Birling Gap is the one break: a National Trust cafe, toilets, a tap, and a row of coastguard cottages being lost to the sea one house at a time. Belle Tout beyond it is the lighthouse that was moved seventeen metres inland on rails in 1999, and beyond that the path climbs one more time to Beachy Head, 162 metres of white cliff with the red-and-white lighthouse at the foot of it, and the highest point on the walk since Firle.

Then it is downhill. The downland ends at the top of Eastbourne as abruptly as it began at Winchester, and the Way finishes on the promenade at Holywell with the town on one side and the sea on the other. The station is two kilometres along the front. Most people walk it.