The small car parks and lay-bys are full, and cars are already beginning to line the sides of the road. The morning sunshine has drawn the crowds to this beauty spot on the top of the South Downs, with its panoramic views of Brighton and the Channel to the south, and the Sussex Weald to the north. A crow calls from the black skeleton of a tree, making itself heard above the noise of traffic and people.
I follow the main path uphill, passing dog walkers and families with running, laughing children, and cut across the white, frost-covered grass and through a gap between the trees. This side of the valley is in cold, dark shadow, but the other glows golden in the sunshine. I carefully descend the muddy paths – still frozen and slippery – down to the bottom, where it is strangely quiet.
This is the deepest and widest dry valley in Britain, and was probably formed at the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago. It’s a reminder that, although no glaciers made it this far south, even here the ground was locked in permafrost.
As the climate warmed and the ground thawed, the meltwater and soil cascaded down on top of the frozen chalk, creating the huge V-shaped ditch we see today. Since then, people have come here for the flint, for self-defence – building a hill fort in the iron age – and, most recently, for pleasure. At the end of the 19th century, an amusement park attracted the crowds with a funicular and Britain’s first aerial cableway.
I clamber up the other side and into the warm sunshine. Meadow pipits flutter across the grass, calling “seep-seep-seep”, and a flock of tinkling goldfinches wafts by. Yellow flowers on the sun-facing sides of the gorse bushes are already bursting into life.
Breathless, I reach the top of the hill and stand on what remains of the hill fort ramparts, and look up at the blue sky. A paraglider is rising into the air. Above it, high up, two ravens, with diamond-shaped tails, are soaring in widening circles, stretching their broad wings.
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