Our friend is a big walker. He'll start off in the morning and not be home before tea. We managed to whittle his original six hour walk down to only three hours, thank goodness - by the end of this ramble around the downs, I was exhausted, particularly because it was freezing bloody cold!

The South Downs is a national park in South East England. The park comprises of an area of chalk upland which stretches from Winchester in Hampshire, through West Sussex to Eastbourne in East Sussex. - Wikipedia

Whilst spring is full of wildflowers on the downs, today was foggy, cold and damp, and a mixture of browns, greeys and greens, with the red hawthorn berries the only warmth on the landscape. Apparently they keep it grazed for habitat for blue butterflies and other insects, and I imagine without grazing, it'd be full of brambles and gorse.

We were too busy taking to take many photos, but I wanted you to see the beauty of this place a little more - here's two pictures from this site which also details the walk we were on and where to park and so on if you were near Brighton and wanted to go on this Castle Hill Walk.

The walk took us past elm trees where birds sung like mad in the tree tops and some badger sets. I've never seen badgers so I'm determined to find some near Jamie's Mum's and go out one night or early morning to see if I can find them.

Of course you can't go past a copse of trees with moss and heart shaped holes in the trunk, can you?

We also walked past an abandoned farm house, which we renovated in our heads as we walked. Can you just imagine? The boys also spent time looking at some old rusty machinery dated to around the 1920's, which they found out was a water pump.

Honestly we were so tired, hungry and cold by the time we got off the towns that the lunch to follow couldn't be found fast enough - but that's for tomorrow's post.