Surrey with the Hills on Top

It was quite a creative game of Scrabble: Lesley had two sets of Scrabble dice with her, so we played with both, which creates a possibility of 14-letter words – not that we achieved any of those!

I’d found Lesley sitting on one of the lower bunks

Gotta love that 1930s architecture! The Youth Hostel at Holmbury St Marys 
 in Surrey, opened in 1935, was the first purpose-built YHA hostel in the UK.

as I levered myself and my two large bags from the narrow passage into the small four-person bedroom that was to be my refuge for the night in the Youth Hostel at Holmbury St Mary.  She was 70-ish, from Gloucestershire, white-haired and cheerful and we both needed a way to pass the evening.

I’d holed up in the Hostel for two nights in order to enjoy some hill walking. I'd never before thought of Surrey, the genteel county adjoining London and the former haunt of Jane Austen, as a place for hill walking, so I was delighted and astounded to discover the footpaths and bridle ways of the Surrey Hills, especially the Hurtwood, which was the area I explored in this brief foray.

Staying at the Youth Hostel was a little cheaper than a regular B&B, and it was situated so that I could leave the car there, and walk straight out onto the footpaths.

Here I am admiring my second mist-shrouded view of the day,
from Pitch Hill, elevation 366 meters (789 feet).
 iFootpath.com says that the view is among the finest in the
Surrey Hills and that the area used to be called "Little Switzerland."
On a clear day you can see the English Channel, 25 miles away.
(Apparently).

I had one full day of walking, 9am to 5pm, during which I covered maybe ten miles, admired several spectacular views obscured  by mist,  traversed fields, negotiated woodlands, crossed heaths, followed country roads and  got thoroughly lost at least six times. My kind rescuers included the staff of a Boy Scout campground, the Italian landlord of a country pub, and a charming young man on a beautifully groomed bay horse. I expect he was some sort of dressage champion.

Footpaths often lead through remote
 areas of heath and woodland . . .

. . . or through agricultural land



But sometimes they lead through built-up areas
and people like to preserve their privacy
 with fences. This section of the path narrowed
to less than three feet wide! I was beginning to
 wonder if I'd have to walk sideways!



"Who's that walking past my field?"

I finally found my way back to the Youth Hostel just as it re-opened for the evening - oh, did I mention that you cannot remain there during the day, you have to leave by 10am and not return until 5pm. 

Youth Hostels abound in the UK – they’re part of the YHA, or Youth Hostel Association (yha.org.uk), founded in 1931 to accommodate people enjoying the countryside on foot. They provided dormitory accommodation and kitchen facilities for you to prepare your own meals. They still do, although they now also offer private or semi-private rooms (but don’t even  begin to think about en-suite bathrooms) and prepared meals, which were a bit pricey at Holmbury.

And they offer a community ethos – hence the lack of evening entertainment, you’re supposed to mix with other hostellers and make you own fun. I expect this happens in all sorts of ways: for me it was Scrabble with Lesley on my first evening, and, the second evening,  Lesley having hostelled on, “Pointless” trivia questions posed by 10-year-old Aidan and answered with varying and somewhat hilarious success by his parents, myself and an elderly mother-and-daughter who lived at either end of England and were meeting for a few days here in the middle of the country.

The best thing about the YHA is the location of its hostels: they tend to be either in gloriously remote places, giving access to amazing countryside for walking, horseback riding and cycling, or bang slap in the middle of the major cities of England and Wales,  giving cheap and cheerful access to metropolitan delights.  I, for one, am grateful for their existence.

It's hard to say what the best thing about the Surrey Hills is! Here are a few suggestions:



Primrose paths.



Amazing trees.



Human stories: this protected larch  tree on
Reynard's Hill is a memorial to David Charlick 
who died aged 19



History: Iron Age hill forts like this one on Holmbury Hill. Can't see it? That's because all that's left
are a few  gorse-covered banks and ditches. After all, it's been there for 3,000 years.



Quirky churches like St Mary's . . .



. . .  with an outdoor tomb in its back wall



Country pubs: there has to be at least one on every walk,
 not, I hope, disappointingly closed, like the Windmill!

The often frustrating attempt to follow a long-distance footpath
like the Greensand Way, which kept eluding me.
It's named for the bedrock of this ridge of hills,
which is not chalk like the South Downs, but greensand,
a type of sandstone containing the green mineral glauconite.

or the flowers:

 

 

 

 

 

Telegraph Hill

I’m back in England now, staying at my sister’s house in Petersfield, Hampshire, having left Findhorn after a very interesting nine weeks there. I may write some more about Findhorn in retrospect, but for the moment here’s what I did on Saturday April 4: I went walking!

I started, as one does, from a pub in the midst of a charming village – Compton in West Sussex to be precise – and took a three mile circular walk over Telegraph Hill. Do come along with me.

"An inn since the 1660s; walker and dog friendly"

Compton’s set on the geological formation known as the South Downs. That’s a chalk ridge that stretches a hundred miles across southern England. Yes, the bedrock is chalk, although it’s not very visible here because there’s a thin layer of topsoil obscuring it. What is visible, however, is flint, nodules of silica that occur in chalk, millions of them. The chalk and flint are  both echoes of the lives of sea creatures who inhabited a huge ocean countless ages ago.

Inside, lies concealed beauty:
this is what a split flint looks like.

The footpath surface is mostly flint. It's a bit
knobbly for walking on.

 

The flints infest the soil - they look like white stones here - and render the Downs more suitable for grazing than arable.
That low grassy bump in front of the trees is Bevis's Thumb . . . read on!

Typical Sussex houses, like this one in Compton,  West Sussex, are often faced with split flints

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Detail of flint facing

 

Flowers of the Forest



Violet: violet

Violet: white

From the village, the path led gently upwards, its margins graced with wild violets of various colors, from deep purple to clear white, and with wild primroses. Such flowers are less common than they were in my youth. My friend George, who grew up in the west of England, once told me that the local village store used to buy bunches of primroses from the children at the rate of sixpence for a hundred flowers. That kind of enterprise might have something to do with the decline of wild flowers in the countryside.

 

Primrose



Lesser celandine



Cowslips on Bevis's Thumb

 

My downloaded trail guide told me to keep to the “bridleway”: that’s a path for horses and bicycles as well as pedestrians; a “footpath” is for walkers only. Most English counties are crisscrossed by a network of such paths, public rights of way, which are more or less well maintained by the relevant county. I’m pleased to report that West Sussex does a good job.

The bridleway passed from the wooded trail out onto open downland. This land, if never occupied by humans, would be thickly forested with dense stands of oak, beech, yew, hazel and other native trees. Forest clearance began here a long time ago: “Current woodland cover has fallen to less than 12% from an estimated high of around 75% around 6,000 years ago.” (Kevin Watts 2006 http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/QJF_legacy_of_fragmentation_may06.pdf/$FILE/QJF_legacy_of_fragmentation_may06.pdf)

 Gradually, over thousands of years, the forest was removed, mainly for grazing animals, and over those thousands of year a rich downland flora has developed which supports many species of insects and invertebrates, and which environmentalists now try to preserve by not allowing trees to re-colonize.  In his 2013 book “Feral” author George Monbiot questions the logic of this approach, as opposed to allowing the land to revert to its natural state. I find it a difficult question: so much of wildness has been lost, why not take advantage of opportunities to let it re-assert itself. But then, what would happen to those plant and animal species that thrive in the grazed downlands?  That concern was overruled during WWII when large parts of the South Downs were ploughed up to grow much-needed food for a Britain largely cut off from the sea routes that usually brought its food.

And so now we have the sweeping views of rolling hills, spattered with woodlands.  Here in West Sussex there’s quite a bit of forest, although right now I’m walking between farmed fields and the wind is galloping along the open bridleway toward me at a steady clip.

Uppark House across the valley.

Off in the distance, well placed on the side of a distant hill, looms a minor stately home, Uppark House. I’ve visited there with my mother in the past. You never know what bit of history, what recognizable characters, you’ll trip across in these properties, now open to the public. Uppark is connected with Lady Emma Hamilton (1765 – 1815), notorious for her entanglement with Admiral Lord Nelson, and was home to the futurist writer H.G. Wells, (The War of the Worlds, 1898, The First Men on the Moon, 1901)  whose parents were employed there.

 

Giant Digit

My trail guide now promises a visit to a Bronze Age long barrow – an ancient burial mound - and I can clearly see an imposing one surmounting a slope off to the right. Rather a long way off I think, the path’s going to have to make a dramatic turn to reach that! It doesn’t, and instead I lower my sights, literally, to see ahead of me a long low grassy mound tucked into the lee of a hedgerow. This, it transpires, is Bevis’s Thumb, the designated barrow on my route. Bevis was a giant of long ago.

This overgrown grassy mound is Bevis's Thumb, a "barrow" covering an ancient burial site - who knew? Thumb, eh?

“The old tales tell that Bevis ate an ox washed down with two hogsheads of beer every week. This same Bevis was said to have cast his sword off the parapets of Arundel Castle.”  (http://www.britainexpress.com/attractions.htm?attraction=3133)

Bevis’s Thumb marks the furthest reach of my walk, and I turn back downhill through hazel coppice to regain the village square where my sister Elizabeth is waiting to whisk me back to modern civilization.




Woodland management by coppicing: trees, especially hazel, willow and chestnut, are cut close to the ground because they then regrow multiple trunks. These trunks can be harvested for many uses: fence posts, tool handles, firewood, and, nowadays, biomass for power stations. Just as thousands of years of grazing have altered the downland habitat, so centuries, or millennia, of coppicing, have created specific woodland environments. I have heard that nightingales like to nest in seven-year-old chestnut coppice. My photo shows hazel coppice on Telegraph Hill.

2. As well as trapping the warmth of the sun and
channeling water to the trees' roots, the tree tubes
are bio-degradable. On my Telegraph Hill walk I
spotted some, probably from 1987,
that are busily degrading!

1. After the Great Storm of October 15, 1987,
which felled 22 million trees across
southern England, I joined other volunteers to plant
 many young replacement trees, protected
by tree tubes like this one. These tubes create a
microclimate conducive to
growth.

 

It was a fine walk, and I was delighted to find, on further investigation, that it's part of a set of short walks clustered around an 18-mile circuit through eight parishes. The circuit is called The Octagon Way (http://southdowns.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Octagon-Walks-The-Octagon-Way.pdf) and my sister and I are now plotting how we can cover all this ground. Gradually, I hope!

More pix from Telegraph Hill:

Ash tree buds bursting

Ancient hedgerow



Mysterious stone marker

Beech