base. Reaching a peak in the 18th century, it is estimated that some 400,000 ewes grazed the Sussex Downs, their fleeces being worked into cloth by Wealden woolmasters, or sold across the Channel to merchants in Flanders.
Although the Downs escaped the ravages of the industrial revolution, food shortages and high prices during the Napoleonic Wars spurred local sheep farmers to return to the plough. When food prices fell, much of the land was restored to pasture, until the First World War once again called for greater food production. With higher yields resulting from improved fertilisers there was no going back, and in the Second World War the extent of this cultivation increased even more.
It was this destruction of traditional downland that effectively blocked the 1947 proposal by Sir Arthur Hobhouse for the South Downs to become one of England’s first National Parks. While several other areas included in his report gained National Park status, in 1956 the South Downs was rejected on the grounds that its recreational value had been ‘considerably reduced by extensive cultivation’. Instead, two Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty were established: the Sussex Downs and East Hampshire AONBs.
The SDW traces the length of the Downs from Eastbourne to Winchester
But walkers were unimpressed by official rejection. Voting with their feet they were drawn in greater numbers to explore the region when, in 1972, its ‘recreational value’ was enhanced by the establishment of the South Downs Way between Eastbourne and Buriton on the Sussex–Hampshire border. Designated an official long distance route by the Countryside Commission, the SDW was the first in Britain to be both a footpath and bridleway. Today this increasingly popular National Trail stretches as far as Winchester.
In 1990, the South Downs Campaign was launched by a coalition of pressure groups representing local, regional and national organisations to fight for National Park recognition. Several million visitors to the Downs each year could not be wrong. Could they?
Twenty years later, after lengthy Inquiries and Appeals, and more than 60 years after the Hobhouse Report to the post-war government of Clement Attlee included the Downs in a list of 12 proposed National Parks for England and Wales, Environment Secretary Hilary Benn finally gave the go-ahead. The South Downs would become the 10th National Park south of the border, in 2011.
Plants and Wildlife of the Downs
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come
Song of Solomon
What makes the South Downs so special?
Since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, everyone drawn to the National Park will have their own response to its lure. It could be a sense of space that attracts, or the subtle curves and folds of the landscape, the steeply plunging north-facing slopes, the dazzling white cliffs at the eastern end, the intimate inner valleys. It could be its history, or its villages. For the walker with an eye for more than just a view with a footpath disappearing through it, a good part of its appeal must surely rest on the flowers that speckle the downland and the birdsong that serenades each mile.
The thin soil of the downland, lying on an immense bed of chalk, is sorely deficient in certain minerals, yet a variety of plant species will be in flower from spring right through to autumn. Among those that favour chalk-rich soils are the rough hawkbit, common milkwort, bulbous buttercup and salad burnet. On open grasslands, the regular grazing by sheep and rabbits over hundreds of years has kept the natural spread of scrub and woodland in check, which has enabled flowering plants to thrive, but elsewhere isolated deposits of clay-with-flint indicate the existence of deeper, more fertile soils that encourage small clumps of trees to stand out in an otherwise bare and open land.
The South Downs is a natural habitat for many different orchids
Cowslips are an unofficial symbol of the Downs
In West Sussex and the Hampshire Downs beechwood ‘hangers’ characterise the steep flanks and continue onto the escarpment. But the beech is not the only tree to flourish here, for oak, ash and yew are also common – the ancient yews at Kingley Vale, northwest of Chichester, are thought to be among Britain’s oldest living plants and are well worth a visit.
In springtime the cowslip (Primula veris) makes its appearance on open downland, and on a few select slopes overlooking the Weald it spreads a great carpet of yellow in April and May. Almost ubiquitous on the South Downs, with some justification the cowslip could be taken as its symbol, for the collection of lightly scented, tube-shaped flowers opening to a cupped ‘face’ are among the natural gems of the National Park – a single stem can host literally dozens of individual flower heads.
At the same time the common bluebell (Hyacinthoides nonscripta) drifts across steep banks where there’s ample shade, and fills acres of broadleaved woodland with its brilliant colouring, sometimes interspersed with greater stitchwort (Stellaria holostea) or red campion (Silene dioica). In those same woodlands, wood sorrel (Oxalis acetosella) also comes into flower in April and May.
In spring and early summer a number of different orchids appear: the early purple, common spotted, and the scented fragrant orchid among them.
Spiky bushes of gorse (Ules europaeus), the yellow kidney vetch (Anthyllis vulneraria) and horseshoe vetch (Hippocrepis comosa) are all members of the pea family and are common to chalky soil, the last two flowering from May to August, while gorse flowers golden almost year-round. On rough grasslands and sunny woodland margins, marjoram (Origanum vulgare) is mainly a summer-flowering plant whose leaves, when crushed, smell of mint. Also seen throughout the South Downs on the chalk grassland, the small scabious (Scabiosa columbaria) flowers from July to September.
But the prize for the most eye-catching and colourful display must surely go to the common poppy (Papaver rhoeas), which invades grassland and arable field alike. It’s not unusual on a summer’s day to gaze across a broad view where swathes of brilliant red or scarlet reach into the distance. Draw closer and you may find long-stemmed chicory (Cichorium intybus) growing amidst the poppies, their beautiful pale-blue flower heads appearing delicate by contrast with their more powerful neighbours.
Writing about the South Downs in 1893, the Victorian essayist Richard Jefferies commented: ‘Under the September sun, flowers may still be found in sheltered places, as at the side of furze [gorse], on the highest of the Downs. Wild thyme continues to bloom – the shepherd’s thyme – wild mignonette, blue scabious, white dropwort, yellow bedstraw, and the large purple blooms of greater knapweed. Grasshoppers hop among the short dry grass; bees and humblebees are buzzing about, and … the furze is everywhere full of finches’ (Nature Near London).
Finches, yes, gathering in flocks in autumn and winter; brambling and chaffinch, thrush and warbler swarm over areas of scrub, attracted by the insect life that scrub supports. Redwing and fieldfare are common migrants, returning to the Downs in the autumn from their breeding grounds in northern Europe. The wheatear is a summer visitor, scavenging on the ground in search of insects. Ground nesting birds such as the meadow pipit and corn bunting are downland favourites, as is the lapwing (or peewit) which lays its eggs among open plough tracings.
Poppies, seen almost everywhere on the South Downs in summer
But it is the skylark that will suddenly rise from the
