A South Downs Way Story
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© 2004 by
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My sabbatical project during the 2002-3 academic year, aside from the usual research, was to walk the South Downs Way. The host institution for my sabbatical leave was the University of Sussex, but we chose to live in Hove in a newly renovated Victorian flat near the sea—convenient, pretty, and, well, pricey. I walked the South Downs Way in bits and pieces from October 2002 through February 2003, mostly on Saturdays. Sometimes my wife Ellen accompanied me, but most often I walked alone. This series of day trips relied almost exclusively on the wonderful public transportation systems of Sussex and Hampshire. I only took a taxi once, and accepted only one ride as a passenger in a car to or from the trailhead.
My reliance on public transportation meant that I had to plan carefully to ensure that I could get to and from the trailheads. The National Trail Guide for the South Downs Way was extremely helpful for its trail descriptions and detailed maps, but I also had to master the bus and rail websites—supplemented with paper schedules and verbal queries—to figure out my routes and connections. By the end of my adventure, the trail guide was covered in little yellow sticky notes containing bus and train schedule data.
A typical hiking day started with me catching a train or bus at about 7 am, getting to the trailhead an hour or two later, and completing the day’s walk by 3-4 pm. Most of the time I carried lunch that I ate on the trail. I frequently stopped for a pint and an early supper near wherever I had finished walking before finally catching the bus or train home, usually arriving before 9 pm. This all took place during the autumn and winter seasons when days were short, so getting off the Downs before dark was a high priority.
I highly recommend this 100 mile walk. It was relatively easy going most of the time, with good paths, often on chalk that doesn’t get very muddy, and with mostly clear trail markings. I wore low, light walking shoes and dressed in layers, inevitably peeling down to just a shirt once warmed up, except in deepest winter. It rained often enough to mandate a good waterproof and hat, and the wind blew constantly. Most of the time the views were stupendous, typically including the sweep of the downs, the dramatic drop of the escarpment, the checkerboard of farmland in the Weald, the periodic smudge of a city, and the blue ocean hugging the horizon. This ancient path had innumerable archeological treasures, so that any given segment was likely to offer one or more Neolithic barrows, Bronze Age earthworks, Iron Age fortifications, Roman tumuli, Saxon or Norman churches, Victorian follies, World War II fortifications, and (unfortunately) modern telecom towers.
In what follows I offer my impressions of the various trail segments in east-to-west order from Eastbourne to Winchester. Since I did not walk the segments in this strict order, my narrative, like that of Kurt Vonnegut’s hero in Slaughterhouse Five, sometimes becomes “unstuck in time.” Please forgive me for this, but I suspect that a geographical rather chronological ordering will be more useful for readers. Note, however, that I sometimes compounded the problem by walking west-to-east on a particular segment. But I typically did so for a very good reason, as my notes on the first trail segment will illustrate.
Introduction