South Downs Way

This should probably be called "Mostly South Downs Way with bits of the Monarch's Way" because that was what we walked in April and May 2017, starting from Winchester with subsequent overnight tops in Warnford, Buriton, Cocking, Arundel, Bramber, Ashcombe, Alfriston and Eastbourne. Most of these places are on or very close the route of the South Downs Way, but we descended to the villages of Warnford and Bamber using short sections of the Monarch's Way. Although these diversions sometimes involved 3 to 4 miles of walking off the South Downs Way (up to two miles from the South Downs Way to a village, then out the other side to return to the path) relatively speaking they were just very short sections of the Monarch's Way, which is variously described as running for anything between 615 and 631 miles, following the route purported to have been used by the fleeing King Charles II after the Battle of Worcester in 1651. We also descended short distances from the South Downs Way to Buriton and Cocking and we caught a train from Amberley Station (which on the route of the path) to the delightful town of Arundel (several miles to the south).

The South Downs Way follows the chalk ridge of the South Downs, hugging the northern escarpment for much of the time, though it heads south for the final section across the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head. Apart from the ups and down on that final section, the walking is relatively level. Indeed, although the South Downs Way has separate "riders" and "walkers" routes on occasion, the two are combined for a large part of the 100-mile length of the trail and quite a lot of it is on "by-ways", usually with quite hard surfaces. However it does make for rapid progress!

The weather in late April and early May can be quite warm, but it wasn't this year! If I have an over-riding memory of the holiday it is that it was rather cold. Cold doesn't really matter when you're walking (and waterproofs double up quite effectively as windproofs) and actually I prefer cold to hot. However, I'd have preferred it somewhat warmer when we stopped for lunch and in particular for the poor other tourists in Eastbourne when we descended to the town at the end of the walk. The good news is that it only rained on a couple of occasions. There were lovely wildflowers, especially cowslips and bluebells, and delightful lambs frolicking about.

The South Downs Way is well signposted, with the usual acorns on the signs indicating that this is a National Trail. In fact, given how much of the route is on by-ways, signposts (which have a purple background on by-ways, rather than the usual yellow for footpaths and blue for bridlepaths) and are almost not needed. The Monarch's Way is also well signposted, with a logo representing the Royal Oak tree at Boscobel (in which the King famously hid with Colonel Carless), the Prince of Wales crown, and the ship 'The Surprise' on which Charles eventually escaped to France. It is worth bearing in mind that when I say a walk is well-signposted, we are not relying on the signposts alone, far from it! Following a few early problems on walking holidays (where we had been supplied with "strip maps", just showing the official route of the path in question), we now always use Ordnance Survey 1:25000 maps, in this case Outdoor Leisure sheets OL32, OL3, OL8, OL10, OL11 and OL25. We download the maps onto an iPad which we carry with us, but we are sufficiently old-fashioned to carry (and love!) the paper versions too. More useful in case of uncertainty when walking is OpenStreetMap, on which we track our route, primarily for the record (we import the tracks into the Google maps which are then given at the bottom of each JordanWalks page), but when the route is unclear, OpenStreetMap is increasingly becoming the best source of information of where paths the actually go - with the added benefit that you check where you are too.

OK, so we're obsessed by maps and mapping...For more information about the places we were walking through, and an overview of the walk, we also carried the Cicerone guide "Walking the South Downs Way" by Kev Reynolds (2015 edition). The reason that we chose this guide over others is that it describes the route both east to west and west to east, and when we bought it we weren't quite sure which way to go. We soon fixed on the west-east direction, for a variety of reasons, primarily so as to end with the spectacular walk along the coast to Eastbourne; I guess I'm biased, but after walking the path I definitely think this is the best way to do it. A variety of websites describe the route, including the National Trails site and the Long Distance Walkers Association, but if you don't get all the background information you want from JordanWalks, the best description I have found from another walker is that from the "rambling man" (aka Andrew Bowden), who also walked from west to east. He writes well.