Southern Comfort

Don’t be fooled by the quaint rolling hills of the South Downs; this chalk spine is no pushover when it comes to racking up the miles.

- Sim Mainey

Downtown Petersfield on a Wednesday night. Kicking our heels waiting for Italian cheese on toast to come out of La Piazzetta’s oven, Rafi and I spot two bikes leant against the pub opposite, tied up like dogs outside a bookies. As usual, the opportunity to sniff around someone else’s bike proves too strong, and we wander over. A 1997 Scott Endorphin and a 2016 Cannondale Slate gravel bike with drop bars and a Lefty suspension fork make an odd pairing, but the geometry is probably reasonably similar despite the 20-year gap. The bike’s owners come out of the pub, eyeing us with suspicion before quickly realising we are ‘one of them’. We chat about their bikes and where they’ve been riding this evening before leaving them to claim our pizzas.

“Are we riding where they’ve been?” asks Rafi, the implication being that trails suitable for a cyclo-cross bike and a hard tail from the dawn of V-brakes won’t set our adrenaline glands flowing aboard long-travel trail bikes.

The South Downs has been a sanctuary for mountain bikers in the South East for as long as people have been riding off-road. This band of hills might lack the ultimate altitude of other riding hotspots, but with all else around them relatively flat, they have a grandeur of their own — a green and white swell of chalk and closely cropped grass.

Running from Winchester to Eastbourne, the 100-mile length of the South Downs is criss-crossed with trails ancient and modern and is where you’ll find Neolithic flint mines butting up against science parks — cutting-edge technology has always been big business in these parts.