Since we seem to have spent much of the Christmas holidays inside, much of the time cooking and then eating (and our New Year's Day housewarming do was a great success and lots of fun), we decided to dedicate the extra New Year bank holiday, on 2 January, to going for a long walk. I wanted to get on a train and go out of London and walk in the country, preferably taking in something of antiquarian interest along the way. And, courtesy of the excellent National Trails website, we found the perfect walk - along the bit of the South Downs Way which skirts the Cuckmere Valley. The downloadable PDF told us which trains and buses we needed to take to the start of our walk and even provided an extract of the right bit of Ordnance Survey map, which we popped onto the iPad and took walking with us! Very handy for zooming in to check which path you need to take at crossroads etc...
We had the most idyllic weather - gorgeous cloudless blue skies and lovely sunny weather, though it as very cold once the sun set. We took a train to Lewes - from handy Victoria - then another train to Seaford, from where we took a local bus to Exceat, then set off across the valley - which was somewhat squelchily muddy thanks to the rain on New Year's Day. There was a white horse cut into the chalky hillside (= antiquarian interest) and our walk took us to the brilliantly-named Litlington where we paused for lunch in the lovely Plough & Harrow pub, before setting off up slightly higher and more wooded ground for the second half of the walk. At the end of which the footpath opened up on to the most amazing vista over the estuary, where the river meets the sea, with its winding channels and waterlogged tributaries glinting in the sunlight. We sat and looked at the view for a goodly while.
We made our way back to Lewes where we stopped off to visit the ruins of the Priory (= more antiquarian interest), which was dissolved by Henry VIII and meticulously dismantled by his engineers - and therefore of interest to K's book research. We had a walk around Lewes, which neither of us had ever been to before and which is really beautiful with a rather fine castle, though surprisingly lacking in good, quaint places to find a cup of tea and a piece of cake - or certainly on 2 Jan! After a refreshment pause, at disappointing Caffè Nero, we got the train back to London - and we were home in time to cook dinner and sit down in front of the new series of Sherlock!
A wonderfully idyllic day and hopefully an auspicious start to 2012!
