London to Brighton : Day 2
Sunday 28 May 2023 · 44.46 km · Elevation gain: 765 m · Steps: 61,492 · Moving time: 9h 31m
There is something about the second morning of a two-day challenge that concentrates the mind rather sharply. Vanessa, Monty and I left Whitfield at half past four in the morning, drove to the Premier Inn at Felbridge near East Grinstead where Sophie and Tamara had stayed overnight, left the car there, and got a taxi at six to take all five of us back to Tulley's Farm in Turners Hill. The early start meant there was still a slight mist hanging over the fields when we arrived, and the sky was a flat, pale grey at the start line. By the time we were underway at seven, the cloud was already beginning to thin.
The second half of the route covers 44 kilometres from Turners Hill across the High Weald and over the South Downs to Brighton Racecourse. Day 2 actually carries slightly more elevation gain than day one — 765 metres against 708 — which is not immediately intuitive given that the finish is at the coast. The reason is the South Downs scarp, which rises sharply from the flat Weald floor and has to be climbed directly before the descent into Brighton. The legs already carry 58 kilometres from the previous day; the hills on day two do not feel smaller for it.
The early kilometres from Tulley's Farm led south through the High Weald countryside, on lanes and paths through mixed woodland. The route was busy with walkers from both the two-day group and the half-distance participants who had joined at Tulley's that morning, and there was a good-natured energy to the first stretch — the mist lifting, the trees overhead just coming into their full late-May canopy.
Roughly ten kilometres in, the route passes alongside Ardingley Reservoir, valley of the High Weald between the villages of Ardingly and Balcombe. The reservoir was created in 1979 by damming Shell Brook, a tributary of the River Ouse, flooding the lower ground of the valley to form a body of water covering 74.5 hectares. Before the dam was built, the site held an iron forge and a fulling mill — the name Fullingmill Wood, which still stands at its northern end, is the surviving indicator of a textile industry that operated throughout Sussex from the late twelfth century to the late nineteenth. The path along its eastern shore is part of the Kingfisher Trail, and on a clear May morning with the water glassy and the banks in white hawthorn blossom, it is one of the better stretches of the route.
South of the reservoir the landscape opens out progressively as the High Weald gives way to the lower ground approaching Haywards Heath and Burgess Hill. The path here runs through farmland and along field edges, and it is somewhere on this stretch that the South Downs begin to appear on the southern horizon — not immediately dramatic, but present, the ridge building slowly as the kilometres pass. By the time the route is clear of Burgess Hill, the escarpment is unmistakable: a long, continuous line of green chalk hill rising from the flat floor of the Weald, with Ditchling Beacon marking its highest point at 248 metres above sea level. A green tsunami that foreshadows the long climb ahead.
Ditchling Beacon is the highest point in East Sussex and has served as a signal station and observation point since antiquity — it was the site of an Iron Age hill fort, and the name itself derives from the Old English for "Diccel's people's beacon." For those of us arriving on foot from the north, having covered the better part of 90 kilometres over two days, the initial view of the escarpment from the valley floor had a slightly loaded quality. The climb is steep and the path cuts directly up the chalk face without concession to gradient; my legs were still tired and sore from the previous day, and I took it slowly, stopping occasionally and working steadily upwards. The view from the top, back across the full breadth of the Weald, made it worthwhile. The white hawthorn was still in flower on the upper slopes, and the light was clear and warm by that point in the afternoon.
The final section from Ditchling follows the ridgeline east before descending through Woodingdean on Brighton's eastern edge and into the racecourse from the north. By this point Sophie had developed serious blisters and completed the last few kilometres barefoot — not quite as drastic as it sounds, given that the finish is on the fully turfed ground of the racecourse itself, but it is the kind of detail that says something about the distance. The path along the racecourse perimeter fence, with the grandstand and the sea just visible ahead, is the point at which the end becomes genuinely concrete: the Channel on the horizon, swifts overhead in the evening light, and the finish line close enough to count down to.
Brighton Racecourse has been a flat racing venue since 1783, when the Duke of Cumberland organised the first public meeting on the common land above what was then a small fishing settlement. The Prince of Wales — later George IV — began attending from the 1780s, lending the course a social standing it held throughout the Regency period. The arrival of the London and Brighton Railway in 1840 transformed its character entirely, bringing mass crowds from the capital on excursion trains. The course still operates as a flat racing venue between April and October, managed by Arena Racing Company since 2012, and the elevated position on Whitehawk Hill — roughly 400 feet above the town — means the views from the grandstand out over Brighton and the Channel are as good as anything on the southern racing circuit. As a finish line for a hundred-kilometre walk, it has an argument for being the best in the country.
Crossing the line as a five was the right way to end it. Medals, distance cards, and a burger and chips from the event catering followed, and then a taxi back to Felbridge to collect the cars for the drive home.
The two-day combined total came to 102.79 kilometres, 1,473 metres of elevation gained, and 137,158 steps. Day 2 alone recorded a moving time of nine hours and thirty-one minutes, for a Relative Effort score of 135. Day 1, for the record, had been scored at 253.
It was, by some distance, the longest thing any of us had walked. The Steely-Eyed Ninja Speed Walkers had delivered.
