one of them. The difficulty was in choosing just 40 routes to represent the essential Downs.
The Essential Downs
The Weald is good, the Downs are best – I’ll give you the run of ’em, East to West.
Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)
These smooth green hills stretch for about 90 miles from Beachy Head near Eastbourne to St Catherine’s Hill, overlooking the River Itchen, at Winchester: an ample, generous land characterised by skylarks, cowslips, poppies and sheep. Angled slightly inland away from the coast, the narrow band rising above Eastbourne broadens into sometimes heavily wooded, parallel ridges further west, while nestling in their folds lie ancient churches and villages of flint, half-timbered brickwork and thatch, some owing their history to estates like Firle, Goodwood and Parham which today preserve large areas of unspoilt grassland.
Kipling was right when he said that the Weald is good, the Downs are best, and millions of visitors a year would probably echo that sentiment, for hills are more seductive than plains and valleys, and the South Downs have a subtle beauty that defies comparison with bigger hills and mountains. Size plays no part in their attraction; after all, the highest Down is only 886ft. Puny, you might think; just a wart, a pimple. But it forms part of a larger whole; a cherished landscape, in perspective as impressive as many a mountain range, and every bit as beautiful.
Anyone who loves open space, an unchecked breeze and a long view will find the Downs rewarding. ‘Hills roll on after hills, till the last and largest hides those that succeed behind it,’ wrote Richard Jefferies in Nature Near London. In countless places no buildings are visible, only hills and valleys – a land without limits under an immense sky. Walking alone up there one can enjoy solitude, although some may find it a little intimidating. Dr Johnson did. He thought the sense of isolation enough to make a man want to hang himself, if he could only find a tree. But many more will welcome the peace and lack of people as invigorating.
There is no wild nature on the South Downs. This is a man-made landscape, and history has left its mark on almost every mile, beginning with primitive Stone Age settlers who grazed sheep, cattle and pigs here before the last Ice Age. A few of their long barrows (communal tombs) remain, and at Cissbury the ground is rucked with the pits and spoil heaps of a Neolithic flint mine; some crude flint implements were also discovered at Slindon.
Many hundreds of tumuli (round barrows) in which Bronze Age people buried their dead line the ridgeway, and at the head of several dry valleys are cross-dykes, reminders of the same period. These may have been part of a defence system to protect routes across open land, or were used perhaps as the boundaries of agricultural estates.
Hillforts, such as those on Mount Caburn, Devil’s Dyke and Old Winchester Hill, proclaim the one-time presence of Iron Age man, but none is more impressive than Cissbury Ring, a massive earthwork covering 65 acres. Although the site had been mined for flint in the New Stone Age, Iron Age settlers built their fortification here some time between 300BC and 59BC, with two clearly defined ramparts and a protective ditch from which around 60,000 tons of chalk had to be dug.
The knowledge of how to smelt iron had reached Britain prior to 500BC, but when Belgic tribes arrived sometime around 100BC, they used this knowledge to create a heavy wheeled plough with which they turned the downland soil, creating in the process lynchets (or field systems) whose rippled evidence can be seen today all along the Downs. The wheeled plough revolutionised agriculture to such an extent that it is said to have dominated the region until the arrival of the Romans in AD43.
Under Roman rule, Chichester (Noviomagus) became the regional capital, with the construction of Stane Street around AD70 being the major link, for both military and economic purposes, with London (Londinium) some 56 miles away. This was a major feat of engineering, for the road was metalled, had a camber, and climbed over the steep-sided Downs between Chichester and Pulborough. Sections of this road are still clearly visible across Bignor Hill, while an important estate was sited at the foot of the Downs outside Bignor village. In 1811 a mosaic of a dancing girl was unearthed here by a plough, prompting excavations which revealed the site of a large and luxurious fourth-century Roman villa. Farmsteads and country houses built around the same time have also been discovered along the foot of the Downs.
By the time the Saxons arrived, landing around AD477 somewhere between Beachy Head and Selsey Bill, the South Downs had been farmed for more than 2000 years, but unlike their predecessors these newcomers preferred to work the valleys spreading into the Weald, where the soil was better watered and more productive. It was the Saxons who cleared large swathes of woodland and created drove roads to connect the scattered parishes in which they built their simple churches. Some of these still stand, like that of St Andrew’s at Bishopstone, while others that were modified numerous times through the centuries retain Saxon features, such as the stumpy tower at Jevington.
Following the Norman Conquest much of the region was divided into ‘rapes’, each of which controlled a strip of coast, an area of downland for grazing, farmland for cultivation, and a section of Wealden forest for hunting. The Normans built castles at Arundel and Lewes, and aided the spread of Christianity by erecting many more solid-looking churches which add character to the villages they serve.
Over the following two or three centuries the population grew, communities expanded, market towns were established and sheep grazing dominated the Downs, while cornfields spread along their base. Reaching a peak in the 18th century, it is estimated that some 400,000 ewes grazed the Sussex Downs, their fleeces being worked into cloth by Wealden woolmasters, or sold across the Channel to merchants in Flanders.
Although the Downs escaped the ravages of the industrial revolution, food shortages and high prices during the Napoleonic Wars spurred local sheep farmers to return to the plough. When food prices fell, much of the land was restored to pasture, until the First World War once again called for greater food production. With higher yields resulting from improved fertilisers there was no going back, and in the Second World War the extent of this cultivation increased even more.
It was this destruction of traditional downland that effectively blocked the 1947 proposal by Sir Arthur Hobhouse for the South Downs to become one of England’s first National Parks. While several other areas included in his report gained National Park status, in 1956 the South Downs was rejected on the grounds that its recreational value had been ‘considerably reduced by extensive cultivation’. Instead, two Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty were established: the Sussex Downs and East Hampshire AONBs.
The SDW traces the length of the Downs from Eastbourne to Winchester
But walkers were unimpressed by official rejection. Voting with their feet they were drawn in greater numbers to explore the region when, in 1972, its ‘recreational value’ was enhanced by the establishment of the South Downs Way between Eastbourne and Buriton on the Sussex–Hampshire border. Designated an official long distance route by the Countryside Commission, the SDW was the first in Britain to be both a footpath and bridleway. Today this increasingly popular National Trail stretches as far as Winchester.
In 1990, the South Downs Campaign was launched by a coalition of pressure groups representing local, regional and national organisations to fight for National Park recognition. Several million visitors to the Downs each year could not be wrong. Could they?
Twenty years later, after lengthy Inquiries and Appeals, and more than 60 years after the Hobhouse Report to the post-war government of Clement Attlee included the Downs in a list of 12 proposed National Parks for England and Wales, Environment Secretary Hilary Benn finally gave the go-ahead. The South Downs would become the 10th National Park south of the border, in 2011.
Plants and Wildlife of the Downs
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come
Song of Solomon
What makes the South Downs so special?
Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, everyone drawn to the National Park will have their own response