The South Downs Way, England

Midsummer, 2016

The South Downs Way follows ancient tracks along the escarpment and ridges of the South Downs, a line of chalk hills stretching across Hampshire and Sussex to the white cliffs of the Seven Sisters. Green, smooth-swelling, unending, the Downs provided inspiration for the Bloomsbury group and continue to exhilarate artists, writers, travellers and walkers today. 

The concourse of London Victoria station a frenzy of movement. Financiers striding anxiously to work as the Pound Sterling plummets in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the European Union. Dazed festival-goers returning from Glastonbury leaving a trail of mud and ennui in their wake. And those like us, keen to be away from the city, jostling against the incoming human tide to board the train. On the southbound journey, we sit opposite a sardonic, linen-suited Guardian reader, eruditely discussing the Brexit referendum with his travelling companion.

Lewes to Alfriston (23 km)

With 23 kilometres to walk before day’s end we linger in Lewes only long enough for coffee and cake and to find the path to the South Downs Way. Steeply up, past a white windmill and dew ponds carved into the chalk and out along the ridge of the downs, named after the old English word for hill, dūn. We cross the Greenwich Meridian Line, from the western hemisphere to the eastern hemisphere, looking out across rolling green and golden fields of wheat and oats. Bold splashes of red poppies, rooks black in the sky, wild Exmoor ponies. In the small village of Southease, we visit a Saxon church with a 12th-century round Norman tower and fragments of medieval murals.

Chalk country, inspiration to writers, artists and wanderers for centuries. The chapter on chalklands in Robert Macfarlane’s evocative and beautifully written The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot fired our imagination and inspired this walk. From the escarpment, the blue you gauge off in the distance slowly becomes the sea, the luminosity the white cliffs of the Seven Sisters.

The sky is full of weather but holds true all day. Cows and sheep and fences with openings for less domesticated animals to pass through. The rural downs as picturesque as a postcard. The remnant chalk grasslands a diversity of wild grasses and wildflowers, small ground birds and butterflies. The walking a pleasure. We tire only when Alfriston comes into sight, first the church spire, then the village nestled in around the church.

Alfriston to Eastbourne, via Coastal Route (19 km)

We slept last night in a 14th-century inn in quaint Alfriston, a quintessentially English village. Flint-walled, tiled roofed cottages with pretty, rambling gardens; a fine village green; a church with a 14th-century central square bell tower; an annual labyrinth festival, based around the church’s own chalk-grassland labyrinth.

Our path follows the Cuckmere River valley, along the kissing gate walk, then uphill for views of the fabled Litlington chalk horse, carved white into the hill one full moon night in 1923. Through beech and pine forest and the secluded wooded village of Westdean and out through a clearing to fine views of the Cuckmere Meanders. The briny estuary tang and the river making its slow, meandering way to the sea. Birds of prey hovering and seabirds circling.

Following the coast, up and down over the beautiful Seven Sisters, seven hills with startling white chalk cliffs topped with close-cropped green turf and wildflowers. Waves pound the chalk cliffs and frost and rain erode them. They are being lost to the sea at the rate of half a metre a year. So too are the houses built on the clifftop at Birling Gap, place of shipwrecks, invasions and smuggling. The light from the squat and misnamed Belle Tout lighthouse was so often obliterated by sea fog that it was decommissioned. Replacing it is a miniature yet classic red and white striped lighthouse, just offshore at the base of Beachy Head, a spectacular high, white cliff jutting into the English Channel and affording 360-degree views of the sea and the downs.

The rare red heather is just beginning to flower, red admiral butterflies flutter in the hedgerows and skylarks twitter. In among the grasslands on the edge of Beachy Head is a poignant heartland of low wooden crosses, memorials to the people who have taken their lives here.

Eastbourne to Alfriston, via Inland Route, then to Southease (15 km)

Last night, in steady rain, we walked into Eastbourne. This morning we wake to a stormy sky, the sea silken grey and glistening in the early light. Following the inland route back to Alfriston, with a detour to see the Long Man of Wilmington, a huge chalk figure, 40 men high, carved into a hill above the village, its origins a mystery. Villages snuggled into hollows in the downs, the spire or tower of the village church the first thing that comes into view, then the cluster of flint cottages.

Dark clouds building. Greenways through the forests. Some very fine views of the downs. And then a bus and a train to Southease, to walk along the River Ouse on an overgrown path to the village of Rodmell and Monk’s House, home of Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard Woolf. We are fortunate enough to hear readings of two of Virginia Woolf’s short stories in her garden writing room and talk to the knowledgeable National Trust staff about the house, its art (that includes paintings, drawings, ceramics, hand-painted tiles) and its famous inhabitants and their visitors.

We stand in Virginia Woolf’s light-filled bedroom and look out upon the downs whose beauty drew her here. We stroll in the serene and beautifully designed garden and imagine the company it may have kept on a fine summer’s day. A place of loveliness, creativity, intellectual endeavour. And tragedy. In 1941, with the carnage of the second world war and her own unquiet mind too much to bear, Virginia Woolf stilled her brilliance. She walked fifteen minutes to the River Ouse and drowned herself, leaving her walking stick on the bank for Leonard to find.

Southease to Charleston & Berwick

We wake in our South Downs YHA camping pod to rain on the roof. Once the sky clears, we set off for one last walk over the downs as far as Firle Beacon, the wind warm, Newhaven harbour off in the distance. Then downhill, on a path a dog walker shows us, through knee-high wet grass, across a meadow to Charleston, home of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and on down an old coach road to St Michael and All Angels Church in Berwick, to see the murals, the altar and the pulpit painted during the second world war by Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Quentin Grant. Pheasants in the fields, hay being harvested, the smell of cows and sillage strong on the damp air. The nearby settlement of Firle is a private village, all its land and houses owned by Lord Gage, including, until recently, Charleston.

Charleston, like Monk’s House, feels as if its inhabitants have just left by the back door to go out for a walk. The complicated, unconventional lives of the artists, writers and intellectuals who lived or spent considerable time here are still a presence in the house. Virginia Woolf used to walk six miles along the South Downs to visit her sister Vanessa at Charleston. John Maynard Keynes wrote his prophetic critique of the Versailles Peace Treaty in the garden here. The wallpaper, the furniture, the fabrics, the ceramics, the fireplaces are all as painted or printed or made by Bell and Grant. The art on the walls is theirs or their Bloomsbury set friends unless it is a Renoir, a Derain, or a Picasso. You can imagine the lively, gossipy company gathered around the hand-painted dining table. And the garden is even more brightly flowering than the house.

You can understand what attracted the Bloomsbury set to the South Downs. There’s space and freedom and beauty. Sometimes tamed and sometimes wild. The fabled chalk horse and the Long Man of Wilmington. The dazzling, chalk-white Seven Sisters. The chalk grasslands that are a sanctuary for the holly blue and the chalkhill blue butterfly and other rare wildlife. The birds of prey, the sea birds and the small songbirds. The rolling velvet green hills and the escarpment breaking like a wave. The South Downs stirs our wanderlust in the most alluring of ways.