South Downs Way 2017: DAY THREE: LEWES to PYECOMBE

The road to the right is the one we came down on the last section, so it's the one to go up. There's a 3 mile spur from Lewes to the South downs Way up on the ridge. Starting out fresh it wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be.
That behind me it turned into one of the best walking days yet. Just goes to show how expectation is a big part of motivation.

Going Up!

Morning Mists and the Kingston Windmill

The panoramas are with me all day. I can always look up and see where I was many steps ago and even yesterday. The Windmill is now on the right, I was up on the furthest ridge at the start of the walk.

View at Lunch

Landmarks are becoming familiar.

Same riders later?

These field walks are the ones I like best. I like opening the gates, walking between the hedges eating blackberries, watching for Robins. I like the smell of the sheep dung and their wool. I like the seed pods on the ends of dried stalks, snails, slugs and distant farms.

The Downs are arable farmed lands, cattle and sheep are plentiful. The old artificially dug slope sided dew ponds, 'mist ponds’ or ‘fog ponds’ ,are still used. They rarely run dry, even in the hottest summer, because during the night, and with rain, they receive a supply of water sufficient to counter-balance the great drags that are made on them. It's amazing how early people came up with this design.

The Keymer Post

Cow meets human convention! Ditchling Beacon is used for various charity and sporting events which are run regularly between London and Brighton, today a cycling fundraiser. The competitions incorporate this steep road as a challenging part of their route. It was also featured as a climb on the first of two days' racing in Britain in the 1994 Tour de France. The cows just wanted to know what was going on.

It's a Mystery!

The guidebook calls this an "ancient ditch" but I later found out it's part of a road that ran through a Iron Age hill fort, around 902BC. The downs are peppered with settlements, forts, burial mounds. The road seemed to follow the contour of the down and descend to the valley below.

People 1200 Years Ago Built This

The hill was later used as a site for beacon fires that were lit in times of coastal attack, when one beacon would be lit then another in a chain across the country.

A Well Preserved Dew Pond

DItchling and the Beacon is said to be haunted and there are a number of tales. One takes place at the earthworks of Ditchling Beacon hillfort where a wild hunt has been heard flying overhead with the sound of horses hooves and yapping dogs. Another version of the tale says the same sound phenomenon is actually a phantom army which passes over the area and leaves a nasty smell as it passes.

On Ditching Common there is a post which marks the spot where Jacob Harris, a peddler, was hanged in 1734 for the murder of Richard Miles. Apart from the site being supposedly haunted by the ghost of Jacob himself, pieces of the post are reputed to have magical curative properties, like others hanged in a similar manner. Among the many diseases curable by carrying around a fragment of the gibbet were ague, neuralgia and toothache, while touching the hand of a man swinging on the gibbet could cure barrenness. The severed hand could also be used to create the infamous "Hand of Glory". A candle was placed in the hand and when lit, a burglar was sure to be safe when entering a house at night as the residents would stay fast asleep while the candle burned.