South Downs
England's newest park — a hundred miles of chalk from Winchester to the Seven Sisters' white cliffs, with the wooded Weald folded in behind the whale-backed ridge.
The South Downs became England's newest national park in 2010 after one of the longest campaigns in conservation — the ridge had been on the shortlist since the 1940s — and it protects the country's signature rock: chalk, the compressed plankton of a Cretaceous sea, drawn up into the smooth escarpment that runs a hundred miles from Winchester to its abrupt marine full stop at Beachy Head, the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain at 162 metres. Kipling fixed the profile — "our blunt, bow-headed, whale-backed Downs" — and the chalk explains everything on it: the springy cropped turf (a wildflower and blue-butterfly habitat that can hold forty plant species in a square metre), the dew ponds, the rivers that appear fully formed at the scarp foot, and the dry combes like Devil's Dyke, the largest chalk dry valley in Britain, cut by meltwater when the ground was frozen solid.
The park's surprise is that it is half not-downs: the boundary loops north over the greensand and clay of the western Weald, taking in heathy Blackdown — at 280 metres the park's highest point, out-topping every chalk summit — and the beech "hangers" of Gilbert White's Selborne, where the Natural History of 1789 invented close-focus nature writing. Humans have worked the chalk from the start: Neolithic miners dug flint at Cissbury Ring five thousand years ago, Bronze and Iron Age people left the ridge studded with hillforts and round barrows — Chanctonbury's beech crown, Old Winchester Hill, Cissbury itself — and the Long Man of Wilmington strides two hundred feet up the eastern scarp, age unknown. The modern layer is drinkable: the same chalk as Champagne, a fact the sparkling-wine estates now ripening along the dip slope have turned into England's most improbable agricultural success.
The eastern climax is the one on the postcards: the Seven Sisters' rollercoaster of white cliffs above the meanders of Cuckmere Haven — undefended, eroding, and whiter every year for it — with Birling Gap's staircase down to the wave-cut platform. Behind the scarp, the twentieth century's artists colonised the villages: Virginia Woolf at Rodmell, the Bloomsbury set's painted farmhouse at Charleston under Firle Beacon, Eric Ravilious turning the bare curves and chalk figures into the defining images of the English downland. It is also, remarkably for a park with Brighton at its foot, an International Dark Sky Reserve — designated in 2016 and named for the astronomer Patrick Moore.
What's worth knowing before you go
No English park is easier without a car: mainline stations ring and pierce it (Winchester, Petersfield, Amberley, Lewes, Southease — a request halt directly on the trail — and Eastbourne), so the South Downs Way, 160 kilometres of ridge from Winchester to Eastbourne and open along its whole length to riders and mountain bikers, breaks naturally into station-to-station days. Water and shade are the planning constraints up top: villages sit below the ridge, so carry supplies and note the trail's taps. The set pieces — Devil's Dyke, Birling Gap, the Sisters from Seaford Head — are rammed on summer weekends; the connoisseur's downland is the empty western half, Harting Down to Amberley, where yew hangers, Bronze Age barrows and paragliders share the scarp, with a detour to Petworth's Turner room for the landscape as he saw it.