How to hike the South Downs Way, the best day hike in the UK

There’s a famous scene 16 minutes into the TV adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman. The title character offers the young boy his hand — by miracle they both take flight from a garden to soar over gently undulating hills.

Beneath the boy’s billowing dressing gown are snowy fields, hedgerows, parish churches — a landscape that on first glance summons up a timeless English idyll. Seconds later they pass the minarets of Brighton Pavilion. Here, you can do some rough mental triangulation and understand those snowy hills are in fact a real location: the South Downs Way. It was the landscape Raymond Briggs inhabited for much of his life, until he passed away in 2022.

For this reason — and for others — the South Downs is a place synonymous, in my mind, with flight. There are the paragliders that cast off from its edges. There are old aerodromes with their grassy runways and passenger jets on final approach to Gatwick. Even the act of walking the escarpment gives you a rare sensation of altitude and open space. You can imagine yourself airborne, looking down to the English Channel on your starboard wing, while on the port side is the Weald, the wooded expanse between the North and South Downs. There are few trees or buildings to obstruct the sightlines on the crest of these hills. You are, if not exactly walking in the air, then walking in its company — ruffled by the breezes that blow unimpeded from the sea.

A gentle gust rakes the hills the day I set out east from Lewes along the South Downs Way. A buzzard climbs into a blue sky; container ships sail the silver waters far beyond Brighton Palace Pier. It’s spring and the days are getting longer: long enough for a day of roaming. The South Downs Way is one of England’s National Trails, running 100 miles from Winchester to the edge of Eastbourne. Over a decade, I’ve walked much of it and seen all seasons. I’ve spent a hot summer’s day sweating up Ditchling Beacon and sheltered from a January shower in a wayside pub in Cocking. Walking its stages had been like filling in a jigsaw puzzle — and one last great hole presented itself at the path’s easternmost point. Here, a trail that flirts so often with the sea finally comes into contact with it beside the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head. I’d long wanted to walk this part — mostly because there was a man along this section whom I wanted to meet.

Pilgrim’s friend

At lunchtime I pass Firle Beacon — so-named for the fires once lit on its summit, perhaps to warn of approaching invaders — and push on to where the escarpment lapses into the Cuckmere Valley. Whenever you walk in the South Downs, you’re conscious of chalk underfoot. It’s present in the milky-white pathways that shine under moonlight; in quarries and landslides that belie the bony matter just below the turf. Chalk was first formed from the shells of tiny marine organisms in the Late Cretaceous period (around the same time that T-rexes walked the Earth). These landscapes have long inspired artists — and, in one case, the chalk has been used to create a kind of artwork itself.

The Long Man of Wilmington appears behind the shoulder of a hill. Originally carved from chalk (and outlined with concrete in modern times), he’s the UK’s tallest hill figure — at 235ft high, he’s the height of about 20 T-rexes — and resident on a 40-degree slope. His face is blank. In his hands he wields two sticks. He’s part of a family of hill figures that inhabit the chalk landscapes of Southern England: a dozen white horses, a few dragons, a lion and one or two other miscellaneous animals — the Cerne Abbas Giant is his only human company. Beyond these facts, little about him is certain: his identity, who first carved him, indeed whether he’s a man at all. As I approach on foot from Lewes, he seems the perfect companion for a long-distance walker — a pilgrim wielding his walking poles aloft. But he’s a figure with multiple meanings. The day before my walk, I’d called Charlotte Pulver — a natural medicine-maker and guide who takes people on seasonal pilgrimages to the Long Man — to try and learn more.

“No one knows the truth behind the Long Man,” she said. “But I personally see his two staffs as representing a kind of gateway.”

Charlotte believes the location of the figure is significant, noting that from autumn to spring the hill is in shadow, while from May onwards he’s illuminated by sunshine. In this way, Charlotte interprets him as a gatekeeper of the seasons — officiating the turn of the year and heralding the return of balmier weather. Charlotte’s visits coincide with the Gaelic season of Beltane, which marks the start of summer: people come to imbibe botanical elixirs, to hear piping and drumming and to make ritual offerings to the Long Man.

“I’ve had some experiences at the Long Man that I can’t really put into words,” she told me. “Amazing things have appeared in the sky when we’ve made offerings, like a rainbow-like light flickering around his head. It’s wonderful there’s this hill figure where we can honour that handover from winter to summer.”

I make my own pilgrimage around the Long Man — following a barbed wire perimeter snagged with sheep wool, drinking a flask of hot tea as I sit atop his head. There have been other interpretations of the Long Man over the years: that he represents St Paul, Beowulf or Constantine the Great. Excited minds once placed his origins in the Neolithic period, though more recent research reveals he’s no older than the 16th or 17th century. Whatever his age or identity, he’s orientated skywards and somehow retains the power to turn the beholder’s thoughts to those vast skies above the South Downs — perhaps because he appears to be sketched from a perspective up in that thin air.

On the last leg of my walk, I follow the River Cuckmere south — where it makes its final meander before mingling with the saltwater — and then veer eastward along coastal cliffs towards Eastbourne. The White Cliffs of Dover are a kind of call sign for England — but their South Downs cousins, the Seven Sisters, are more spectacular, charged with the same homecoming symbolism. Here, the subterranean chalk along which walkers have so long trodden is suddenly thrust into the air — its interior revealed like a slice of cake, with horizontal bands of flint for layers of icing.

I end my walk at sunset on Beachy Head, where Britain’s tallest chalk sea cliff tumbles into airy oblivion. Here’s another place synonymous with flight: base jumpers periodically leap here and RAF Spitfires sometimes make flights past this most iconic English landmark. A sign by a little phone box explains the Samaritans are always there to talk, day and night.

Beachy Head also sits on an avian highway between Britain and the continent. It’s a place where the turn of the year can be measured in flight. You can see brent geese migrating in spring; honey buzzards, ospreys, marsh harriers and thousands of swallows busy the skies over Beachy Head come late summer and early autumn. I peer gingerly over the edge to see gulls on the wing far below, wheeling over breaking waves. For the briefest moment you might imagine you’re one of them: lofting in unconstrained freedom over the rolling sea and the rolling hills. Higher still, a red sky foretells good weather to come.