A splendid view from the South Downs

Part 1

Despite my blisters, I’d been looking forward to walking the second quarter of the South Downs Way. So, last weekend we set off again. On the Saturday leg, we were joined by one of the lovely Autumn’s friends, Bruce. Wiry and fit, he often works as a professional football referee. Clever and ambitious, Bruce has been Head of Geography at a school in Southampton for five years, despite being only 31. Bruce and his wife picked us up in their car at Petersfield station and drove us the two miles to where we finished the trail last time.

We started in high spirits – Autumn caught up with the gossip and I quizzed Bruce (an informed and intelligent sort) on his thoughts on the current affairs of the day. This section of the Way starts on a tree-covered country road, so quiet that we didn’t see a single car in over an hour. The only traffic were speeding mountain bikers, shouting warnings before whistling past. After a yet another lycra-clad apparition disturbed our conversation Bruce quipped “I thought you booked the path?” Still, time passed quickly, no doubt sped along by our high speed nattering. Suddenly it was mid-day and we’d walked a third of the day’s distance.

Sun-lit path through the forest

It started raining as we walked across a meadow and wrapped in our hoods we almost missed the first spectacular view to our left. Fields and villages stretched away from us while the dark sky streaked rain; at our feet the copper spire of South Harting church, fluffy-white bonfire smoke and sheep spread out like breadcrumbs on a rectangular green table cloth.

We navigated our way down a slope with an even steeper incline facing us, the speeding mountain bikes were now being pushed up the other side. After a hard climb to the top, we found a couple eating a picnic which included brewing coffee in a cafetiere. This was another Beacon Hill, where fires would have been lit to warn of the Spanish Armada in the 1580s – we’d climbed another on our first day. Bruce looked at the map and figured out that we’d come the short (but hard) route and the Way actually went round the hill.

It was time for lunch. Bruce’s geography-teacher map reading skills came in useful again and allowed us to navigate off the hill, down paths made slippery with ‘chalk flour’. We ate ploughman’s lunch with gigantic slices of cheese bought in a tiny, low ceilinged pub. The beer garden had several large beds of sturdy, richly coloured roses and looked onto a giant bank of the Downs. After a quick visit to the village’s Saxon church, we headed back to the Way.

On the route up we passed a wooden carving of St Christopher carrying a baby Jesus on his shoulder.

St Christopher at Elsted

The saint points the way to the next village and beneath his waist a sign reads:
‘Who carried Christ
speed thee to-day
And lift up they heart
All the way’

Later, sheltering amidst the stinging nettles in a wood, we saw a small gravestone of a German pilot who must have crash landed there in 1940. The stone was recently tended with Poppy Day crosses and large daisies placed beneath it.

Somehow the first day’s walking came to a close and we soon found ourselves heading down from the Downs through a field of rich, deep clover. We spent the night in Cocking, an otherwise picturesque village spoilt by a busy road running through it. The owner of our B&B, Mrs H., welcomed us with the offer of tea, which we had to decline as we were off to have dinner with Bruce and his wife, Laura. Instead, the kettle went on after we returned from our meal, and we finally settled down for a chat.

Tall, with a slight stoop, Mrs H. had been running her bed and breakfast for about fifteen years. It was hard to remember exactly how long, she said. Her house was stuffed with items brought back from Nigeria and South East Asia where she had lived with her husband who had worked for ICI. There were Vietnamese tables, Javanese shadow puppets, and ebony figures from Africa. One wall was covered in ‘chinese’ hats. She said the thing she liked most about having paying guests was meeting interesting people. “Who needs to go on holiday, when the holiday comes to you”, was how she put it.

Many of her guests had been had been walking the Way. Her favourites included four Irish women whose infectious good spirits had filled the house with laughter. One time a Japanese woman had performed the Tea Ceremony on the dining room table. The most unusual must have been the Carthusian monk who had been walking from his monastery in Le Grand Chartreuse to another monastery in West Sussex. The monk knocked on the vicar’s door, who then brought him round to Mrs H.; he too was Irish and had studied at Lancaster University in the 70s. Despite the austerity of his calling, the monk was an excellent mimic and spent his evening entertaining Mrs H with impressions of television personalities from thirty years ago. He left his round straw hat as a thank you, for which Mrs H had insisted he took a straw solar topee in return.

Mrs H. and Jon

After more chat over a hearty breakfast, we left feeling we’d met a real star of our journey. We couldn’t even make it to the end of her drive before turning back to take pictures of our kind host. Before heading up the path back up to the downs, we stopped in to Cocking Church to see the medieval wall painting that Mrs H. had mentioned. The fragment is faded and shows a simple image of a man in a long brown robe with a boy and small dog standing up on its haunches. It’s supposed to be part of the Nativity story of where the angel appears to the shepherds, but the resonances with the local area are clear. Sheep rearing was big in these parts in the Middle Ages – yesterday we walked past ‘The Shepherd’s Church‘ at Didling – and the Downs feature in the scene as an oblong block with a wavy top.

Back on the Way, we came across a farm with flint barns and brown and black pigs in the yard. The farm had a shop where we bought sandwiches and  banana cake from the ruddy cheeked farmer’s wife. She told us that there were tumuli further up the path, and someone she had spoken to had seen signs of prehistoric settlements on satellite images of one of their fields. After saying out goodbyes, we set off under a baked blue sk. The path turned to flint between meadows which grazed deep-red Sussex cows, and then changed to chalk over dun-coloured stubble fields. We walked for long periods through shady woods, before finally emerging in the stubble again and then sweating up a hill under the strong sun.

At the top of a long slope, we found the shade of a small coppice in which to sit and eat our sandwiches. The view looked over our route of the last half hour or so, and someone was already sitting there enjoying it – a pair of knobbly knees stuck out from behind a golfing umbrella. I would have preferred more privacy as I thought this was the ideal spot to propose to Autumn. I’d been thinking about putting the question to her for a while, for too long in fact. Okay, I’ll admit I’d been putting it off. Finally action was called for, so on the Friday before the walk I went hunting for a ring. I finally found one that seemed right. I found it in Hamleys, purveyors of the ‘The finest toys in the world’, that way Autumn could choose her own ring later. Before we set off I reckoned, that there’d be somewhere suitable to pop the question on the South Downs and this spot seemed to be it. So,out came the pink plastic heart-shaped ring, and luckily, she said yes.

Cracking up at the hilarity of it all

Before setting off again I was just about to nip into a hedge and answer nature’s call, when I was approached by a middle-aged man wearing black shorts and a leather bush hat.
“Are you just here on a jolly jaunt?” he asked
Despite wanting to tell him that we were just about to be off on a jolly trip to the loo, I managed to get out:
“Yes, just walking the South Downs Way” while wondering what else we might be doing standing in the path, “What are you up to?”
“Looking for something…” he said, as he put his hand into the undergrowth near a fence post. He pulled out a small plastic sandwich box which contained a roll of paper and a few sparkly, children’s trinkets. It turned out he was called Peter and was a taking part in the sport of ‘geo-caching‘, which is a sort of GPS-powered orienteering. Geo-cachers are given the coordinates of these small boxes and when they find them by using their GPS-systems, they note the fact by writing their names in the log book contained within the box. They can also leave small presents for others in the club, or more accurately, for their children. He said that the game “can become quite obsessional”, and explained that as we were not part of the sub-culture, we were ‘muggles’ – outsiders, although he didn’t mind letting us in on a few of their secrets. Peter joined us for about a mile before heading off in the direction of another cache.

An old Roman road, Stane Street, stretches over the vast expanse of Bignor Hill. There’s also a modern road that leads down to Bignor Roman Villa where you can see some well preserved mosiacs and a hypercaust system. Unfortunately, travelling by foot leaves little time for detours, so we carried on up and over the hill to be presented with another stunning view. After another hill we finally came down from the Downs to the village of Amberley for a pint of beer, to take the weight off the blister (just one this time) and take the (replacement bus service and then) train home.

Part 3