Arundel to Amberley - South Downs Walk

Finally the leaves are arriving

We were back in Arundel one of these weekends past.  On a day when it finally felt like spring was on the way.  We are in training for our walk in the Alps later this year, so we picked one of the hardest walks in our book.  We had already been to Arundel last year, we were going to attempt this walk then, but ended up leaving London too late, and just spent the day checking out the castle and the village.

This time we actually made it out of the village, which was definitely the right move.  The South Downs are really wonderful.  It was English countryside at it's best, or at least some of it's best that I have seen.  There were wonderful, rolling green hills, cows, rabbits, birds.  And a great lunch at a really walkers friendly pub.

Hiorne Tower with the rolling hills

Looking back to the tower, with a lake in between us

This time it was straight past the castle, straight past the freaky half churches, and disappointing churches into the Arundel forest park.  England every now and again surprises you with some fairly extensive 'wilderness'.  It's still not that wild, given the numbers of sheep grazing around the place.

Looking down at Amerberly from the South Downs - piles of chalk in the ground

A lone horseman

This walk was rated a 7 out of 10 for toughness, I guess because it was almost 20kms long with a fair bit of up and down.  You are walking over the South Downs after all.  We had to really power the first part of the walk, there were 6 miles between the start and the lunch spot, and only 2 hours to do it in.  The lunch spot was a very popular pub in those parts, so we had made a booking, but they only did a sitting at 12:30.  We made it in time no worries, and they didn't even care about our excessive amount of mud we were carrying on our trousers, we did leave our boots at the door out of respect though.  If you are ever in the neighbourhood of Burpham (great name) I would recommend the George and Dragon Inn, good food, and great staff.

Church in St Leonards - 11th century

How English is this scene!

The first part of the walk is through the Arundel Park, where you can imagine the Lord of the day would go hunting and persecuting peasants.  There was a random tower in the middle of the park, Hiorne Tower. This tower was actually used in the filming of some really old versions of Dr Who, in 1988.  It is quite a pretty tower, with a good stone pattern, and of course it is haunted, as all good towers should be.

From this point it was pretty much up and down all day.  We poked our head into the churchyard of St Leonard's church, which is from the 11th century.  It is still lit by candles, but given the tight lunch deadline, we didn't have time to investigate further.  Unfortunately it's last rector left in 1928, so ever since then it's been under the care of the Vicar of Arundel.  I guess given that the town it's sitting in has a population of 57, there perhaps isn't such a need for it's own Rector.

The cannon thing would fire off every now and again - we think it was a modern scarecrow

As we were walking through the many fields, we would often hear what sounded like a cannon or a gunshot, you aren't worried that you are about to be shot, given the incredible rights of way you get in this country.  But it was kind of odd.  Eventually we narrowed it down to the object in the above photo, it's some kind of air cannon, and it must have some sort of sensor attached, since anytime a bird came close it would fire off.  It did seem to keep the birds away, though given the lack of crops I'm not sure what they were protecting.

Incredibly muddy field

Towards the end of the walk we had to come down a steep hill, and then back up the other side, damn you South Downs.  But it seemed like the farmer on the other side didn't really like walkers.  The field in which you had a right of way in was just an absolute mud bath, you can see in the photo what I'm talking about.  But this was only a small section of the field, the entirety of it was like this, it was incredible.  There wasn't even any grass for the cows to eat, the farmer had to give them hay.  It's not as if this was the only field the farmer had, he could have moved them into a field which actually contained grass.  I don't know, maybe he wasn't a very good farmer.  It was pretty tough having to fight your way through this at the end of a long day, and going up hill.  Then all the cows were clustered near the exit.  I couldn't blame them, I wanted to get out of that field as fast as possible too.  It was just a bit scary having to sort of use the gate to push them out of the way.

Looking down to Amberly - and the weird marshes

We actually ended up skipping a bit of the walk at the end.  Which since our train was delayed we could have done anyway.  It was through the marshes around Amberly.  But it had been a long day and I was looking forward to a nice sit down on the train.