Sunday Stroll

Coming down a steep track off the South Downs Way near Lewes early yesterday evening, I thought my kneecaps might shear off or my calves burst open. My usual idea of walking is a maximum of 8 miles with at least two pub stopovers on the way; but yesterday, as one of seven walkers helping two friends train for Herculean walking feats later in the year, we covered the 20 miles from Birling Gap to Kingston village. It was not a Sunday stroll; today, I have been mostly nursing sore feet. Hopefully my younger, fitter friends will not be feeling quite so much pain. One will be walking non-stop from London to Brighton in May for Great Ormond Street Hospital; another will be scaling the peaks of Ben Nevis, Scafell and Snowden in 24 hours in June to raise money for the Breast Cancer Campaign.

The day had forecast rain, but it was dry as we assembled at Birling Gap at 10 o’clock in the morning. The car park was busy with walkers being dropped off and, as we set off along the Seven Sisters, it was like the first day of the sales. But the walkers had thinned out as we neared Cuckmere Haven and, by the time we crossed the East Dean Road with the first 5 miles behind us, we only came across the occasional dog walker as we skirted Friston Forest on the 3 mile trip up to Alfriston for a lunch stop. Across the valley we could see the Litlington White Horse, one of only a dozen in Britain outside of Wiltshire. The current horse dates from the 1920s and superseded the first chalk horse, carved a hundred yards higher up Hindover Hill to celebrate the coronation of Queen Victoria. In the village of Litlington itself, we passed Clapham House, once the home of George IV’s mistress, Maria Fitzherbert. He secretly married her, in a ceremony which was later declared invalid, and she bore him children - nobody is sure exactly how many. He eventually dumped her, of course.

At the Star Inn in Alfriston, we were greeted at the door by a large carved wooden statue of a lion’s head. The dependable Kev Reynolds informed us, in his guide The South Downs Way, that it was a figurehead plundered from a Dutch ship wrecked in Cuckmere Haven in the mid-19th century. Inside, we were greeted by a live musical duo that serenaded us with a selection of hits from the 1980s as we had lunch and a restorative pint. It was all a little Phoenix Nights. Coming out of the pub and sitting in the emerging sunshine by the war memorial, as others stocked up on chocolate and energy drinks in the village shop, I could understand how Eleanor Farjeon was inspired by the beauty of the village to write the hymn, Morning Has Broken.

Having thought I might take an early footbath and stop after 8 miles, the brightening skies convinced me that carrying on for another 12 would be a good idea. However, once we were high up on the hills above Firle and Newhaven, the threatened rain looked as though it would finally close in on us. The honeycomb dome and pencil chimneys of the Newhaven incinerator seemed to be permanently on our left and, however much progress we made, we could not seem to put them behind us. The rain held off but a battering cross-wind made the going tough. Once we had crossed the River Ouse near Rodmell - where Virginia Woolf filled the pockets of her overcoat with stones and fatally waded into the depths (an action some of us could sympathise with at that point) - we knew that we had less than five miles to go; but aching limbs and flagging spirits made it a long final leg. Despite this, we all of us made it, limping into The Juggs pub at 6.30pm to be revived with a feast of beer and chocolate.

Sea Power

When the Devil’s Chimney, a 200ft high chalk tower that was part of the Beachy Head cliffs, collapsed into the sea in April 2001, there were several theories as to the cause: the rough seas that had been battering the rock-face throughout the preceding winter; driving rain that had penetrated the chalk and then frozen and expanded, causing the cliff to crack; a curse that had existed since Aleister Crowley, the fin de siecle occultist, had climbed the tower in 1894.

Discounting the third theory, the Environment Agency was certain that climate change was responsible for the first two. Increasingly stormy winters had accounted for the collapse of an even larger section of Beachy Head two years earlier, and the sudden disappearance of the Devil’s Chimney was part of an emerging pattern. But since those events at the turn of the century, coastal erosion at Beachy Head has been within expected limits for an undefended rock formation. However, at other points of the East Sussex shore, it has been a different story.

Slightly to the west at Birling Gap - a dip in the high coastline - several cottages on the low cliffs have been lost to gradual erosion in recent decades, and the turn of this year brought a more dramatic alteration to the cliff-face. The powerful swelling sea that buffeted the south coast at New Year, claimed a 3-metre section of chalk, making the cliff edges unstable and closing the already precarious steps down to the beach. Much more spectacularly, at Rock-a-Nore to the east of Hastings, the sandstone cliffs suffered a dramatic collapse after days of heavy seas pounding their base. The remarkable day-time rock fall was captured on film by eyewitnesses.

The effect of the continuing winds, whipping up the power of the sea, is that the craggy East Sussex coastline has become a treacherous place and coastal paths have had to be closed, limiting access to cliff and shore in many places. Perhaps walking the more sedate coastal plain of West Sussex is the way forward for the rest of this wild winter.

Blue Sunday

The dog days are fading and summer’s lease has nearly run its course. Larkin’s toad is about to squat on my life again. Walking the Seven Sisters with the sea on my left and ovine-trimmed grassland to my right, the first day of September sunshine was playing dreamily on the English Channel.

The further west I walked along the undulating path, the more people I encountered picnicking on the cliff top. Gazing out at the blurred line between sky and sea, the horizon only made distinct by the slow stately progress of the occasional tanker, they seemed transfixed by being at the very edge of the land.

The ground along the cliff top was dotted here and there with chalk stone patterns. These were clearly arranged by human hands but what I first thought were examples of Andy Goldsworthy-style land art, on closer inspection revealed themselves to be something more mundane: names, phone numbers, boy bands, slogans – the lingua franca of tourist graffiti.

By the time I reached the final sister, the eastward view back along the coast to Birling Gap was magnificently crowned by the silhouette of the Belle Tout lighthouse. But it was to the west, as Seaford Head and Cuckmere Haven hove into view, that the unlikely azure of the sea dispelled the Sunday blues and caused the spirits to soar.