3. Continuing Along The South Downs Way

Southease Church

The gaps in the South Downs ridge run roughly north/south and contain the villages although they’re generally a mile or so north or south of the actual path.  Many of these villages are classic English country style collections of thatch and flint and cobble set about with climbing roses and tumbling overplanted gardens.  There are many beautiful cottages but not ones I’d want to live in because they generally have tiny windows.   Some of the churches are interesting to see though, for instance the lovely little one at Southease has a round tower and unusually is not dedicated to any saint.  From the tops of these huge whale-backed chalk hills there are distant views.  To the north we look over the patchwork of what looks like a well wooded landscape with more hills in the distant haze.  To the south ten miles or so away, we’re accompanied by the Brighton, Hove, Worthing conurbation with hundreds of thousands of people living in it, and as far as we’re concerned, most of them rather wonderfully staying in it.

We broke our walk to go to a funeral in London.  My oldest (but not most elderly) friend’s mother who I had first met when I was four or five years old.   An expected occasion but a sad one nonetheless and sobering to realise that although she had lived well into her nineties, when I first met Dolly she would only have been in her mid-twenties.   Naturally, while we were near the big smoke (wood burning stoves apparently) we took the opportunity of being in London to see some other friends, brother and sister-in-law and number one son and daughter-in-law out near Oxford.  On the way back towards the South Downs we had one of those warning lights that informed us to “see a Fiat dealer as soon as possible”.   So we carried on and got to our campsite in Winchester, turned the engine off and in the morning turned it back on again.  Somewhat irritatingly the warning light was still there and then throttle didn’t have any effect on the engine either.  So assistance was called for and to my surprise I found out that there is no longer a cable between the accelerator and the engine, it’s electronic.  That fault was something to do with battery power but our main problem was something to do with the Diesel Particulate Filter.   As the renowned Science Fiction author Arthur C Clarke said “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”  and this was to us.  It was OK to drive so we carried on to a garage we’d identified on the internet in Worthing where we had previously arranged to pick up a hire car on that very day.  The garage where we left our valued home was not even in a back street but down an alley off a backstreet.  Our good friends Jan and Clive were putting us up for the night and the garage fixed it all (or took the bulbs for the warnings out) by the next day.   And we still stayed two more days – be warned !

Oh, and the hire car.  We made our way to Europcar where we were greeted with some bafflement because they didn’t have a car for us.  Heather produced the documents and when asked we both chorused that no we could not come back the next day.  All they had was a small van so we’ve spent the last week driving our motorhome and a white van with Europcar blazoned along the side around Sussex.  The extra car was to help with our

linear walk, in the absence of useful public transport to get us from one end of a day’s walk to the other.  Taxis are often on school runs until 9.30 or so and cost £25 or more for each trip.  Our small van has cost £112 for eight days and it has been an experiment for us.  There’s a lot of driving back and forth but it is much more convenient and cheaper than the taxi and so will be considered again.

Devil's Dyke

This is really a fantastic walk and we’re enjoying wonderful scenery.  We’re walking in an extended period of hot, sunny weather and it is punishingly hot at times but it is generally fairly easy walking.  It isn’t just that there are no villages on the tops, there are few trees and very little shade.  Even the extremely welcome breeze doesn’t blow at times.   I can imagine though how horrible it would be in driving rain which I expect would be horizontal for much of the time.

Bignor - the 24 metres 

of exposed mosaic

My knee continues to be a nuisance.  Fine for a 12 or 14 mile walk but it doesn’t seem to like too many consecutive days of them.  So occasionally we have an enforced ‘rest day’ which means we see things we otherwise would not.  On one rest day we went to the Roman Villa at Bignor, a little north of the path, near Pulborough.  A farmer ploughing in the early 1800s hit a large stone and when he investigated found that it was in the middle of a mosaic.  When excavated, the whole site was found to be an estate of seventy or so buildings set in more than four acres with several different areas of magnificent mosaic flooring, some of it displayed just as it was uncovered, rather than having been restored.   They’re said to be some of the best preserved mosaics in the world.  These mosaics were laid on chalk which is very stable, so they have generally not moved that much even in 1500 years or so and they are stunning.  To give some idea of the magnificence, the biggest of the mosaics here is seventy metres long, much of that is presently covered over with soil but inside a protective building there is an exposed twenty four metre stretch, perhaps three metres wide of beautiful flooring.  It’s the longest mosaic on display in Britain.   Well worth a visit to any of you who happen to be anywhere nearby.  This villa is mentioned in our walking guide book (Trailblazer, easily the best walking guides around) where it suggests, a tad optimistically I think, to “look out for Roman coins in the dust”.

Bignor mosaic - the injured gladiator

The South Downs Way only actually passes through six villages in the whole 100 mile length.  Three consist of just a church and a few houses, one other has a café, another has a pub which rather bizarrely sells bread and the other, Alfriston is a village with pubs, shops and stuff.   This great ridge seems more impressive looking down from the top across miles of farmland, woods and villages than looking up at it from the plain below.    So, anyone walking it with accommodation along the route would generally have to walk a mile or so downhill and then back up again in the morning.  That would usually be steep slopes, and starting off in the morning going up is not good but it would be even worse coming down with tired, wobbly legs after a day pounding the unforgiving chalk underfoot.  Fortunately we don’t have to do that because we have our trusty van waiting for us, well one of them at least.

The Goodwood Festival of Speed took place about the same time we were nearby.  This is a fast and classic car get together with people who have them showing them off and those who haven’t drooling over them.  I haven’t been to it but I imagine this is a lot of what happens.  It is a wonderfully ironic name for the event because the roads for miles around are clogged to a standstill with traffic and it’s quite amusing to see all those Porsches, Maseratis, Lamborghinis etc… stuck in amongst the buses, family cars and white vans.  Festival of Speed indeed !

looking NW from near Amberley

And the knee ?  Well, following a visit to a physiotherapist, a diagnosis of nothing wrong with the knee but tight muscles, followed by a leg massage, we had a day looking at Winchester.  Quote of the day heard in Winchester “they aven’t even got a KFC ere”.  KFC of course is Kan’t Find the Chicken.  Then the knee got a stress test of three days of walking, an 11 mile, a 12.5 mile and rounded off with a 17.5 mile day.  All fine !

Seaford Beach