The South Downs

Chalk hills roll and plunge into frosty combes, cool mists swirl around wooded slopes and cosy villages await winter wanderers. Pull on your boots and scarf to explore the South Downs this January.

- Matthew Oates

The diadem of magical places that we call the South Downs reaches out from the chalk lands of southern Hampshire deep into the kingdom of Sussex. It is hard to determine where the downs start, but they end dramatically and conclusively, plunging into the English Channel at Beachy Head, immediately east of the Seven Sisters, near Eastbourne.

Like the North Downs of Kent and Surrey, they consist of a steep scarp slope and a long, more gentle dip slope. In the South Downs, the escarpment faces north, which renders the turf cool and mossy, while the dip slope ambles away southwards, towards the English Channel, and is dissected by deep and hidden dry valleys, known as combes. Much of this gently sloping land consists of vast arable fields, open plough-land in winter.

Four swollen brown rivers cut through and divide up the South Downs – the Arun, Adur, Ouse and Cuckmere. Each of the resultant sections of downland is distinctive, but the greatest landscape character difference lies between the western downs, of Hampshire and West Sussex, which are often steep,incised and wooded, and those of East Sussex, which are open and rolling.

HAMLETS AND HOUSES

The built environment is as strong an element of the South Downs as the natural and farmed environments and one which the establishment of the South Downs National Park Authority in 2010 will help to conserve. Local distinctiveness is profound here, from the villages that have sprung up around the clear streams that bubble up where chalk meets the gault clay at the foot of the downs’ escarpment, to those snuggled away in hidden valleys, or the hillside hamlets miles from anywhere.