South Downs Way

The South Downs Way is a hundred miles of chalk, and chalk is the whole story. It holds no running water on the surface: there are no streams on the tops, and 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 drains fast after rain. This is why the Way is walkable in February, why the going is fast, and why there are taps along it. Fill up at every one.

It was the country's first long-distance bridleway, opened in 1972 between Buriton and Beachy Head and extended west to Winchester after 1987, and it is still open to horses and bikes from end to end — they take the inland route at the finish, where walkers can keep to the cliffs. 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: a clear chalk stream in a valley of thatch and flint. The climb out goes over Old Winchester Hill, an Iron Age hillfort and a National Nature Reserve, and a fine place to eat lunch in a bank of orchids, and then along a high ridge past Leydene, where the navy trained its signallers as HMS Mercury until 1993 and where there are houses now, 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 between Chichester and Midhurst. In 2002 Andy Goldsworthy set a line of great chalk balls along the downs between Cocking and West Dean, 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 climbs the scarp here on a terrace cut into the hillside and runs on south across Gumber Down as a raised bank you can still walk along. Bignor Roman Villa, whose mosaics are among the finest in Roman Britain, 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, the first of the four rivers that cut clean through the downs, and the widest of their 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. Charles Goring of Wiston House planted the beeches on the hillfort in 1760, and for two centuries the clump was one of the best-known landmarks in Sussex, until the storm of October 1987 took most of it down in a night. The replanting is a generation from catching up. From the Ring, Steyning is directly below and the Weald runs away to the north.

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, in the National Trust's words, the longest, deepest and widest dry valley in Britain, and it was a Victorian pleasure ground — a cable car across it from 1894 and a railway up its steep north face from 1897 — and there is still a pub on the rim and, at weekends, a bus from the city. 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 working farm hamlet the National Trust owns, with a donkey wheel that raised water from a well fifty metres down. 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 on its far side. 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, all of them in this valley, and a station on the Lewes to Seaford line right where the path crosses it. 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 medieval hall house, its oak felled around 1400, that the National Trust bought in 1896 for ten pounds, the first building it ever saved.

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 from Litlington down to Exceat the path keeps to its bank. Below Exceat bridge the river runs to the sea in a straight cut made in 1846, and the old loops it bypassed lie on the valley floor beside it, the view you have as you climb away.

From Exceat the Way climbs straight out of the valley and the land runs out. What is left is the chalk cliff of the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head, 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 pushed seventeen metres back from the edge on greased beams in 1999, and beyond that the path climbs one more time to Beachy Head, at 162 metres the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain, 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.