As of yesterday Britain has a new national park on its southeastern shore: South Downs National Park, which spreads over 1600 square kilometres from Winchester to Eastbourne.
It is not entirely the stereotype of the lonely national park. Brighton, its environs, and its high population throng under the southern margin at the side of the Channel; London is an afternoon's outing away; and over 108,000 people live in the park proper.
Like a central nerve the South Downs Way, open for cyclists and horseback riders and walkers, stretches between the cities and threads the expanding park. Besides the attractions of Winchester and Eastbourne, there are the white cliffs not of Dover but of Beechy Head (which seems to have, however, also attained the importance of a cliché), sheep, rolling slopes, the ex-forest Weald of Sussex, &c., &c., and an Iron Age hill fort by name of Chanctonbury Ring.
Despite the prevalence of the species Homo sapiens, a gently written article in the Guardian paints a pleasing bucolic portrait:
"Bronze age farmers knew the area, medieval ironmasters hacked at its copses, and 18th-century owners enclosed its fields. It remains a landscape that Jane Austen, who lived at Chawton near its northern boundary, would recognise"
"There are still wild spots: chalk downlands and woods, heathland and beech hangers, but this archetypal English landscape bears the marks of many generations."
And the writer remarks that corn buntings and grey partridges dwell in the downlands while nightjars and woodlarks haunt the heathlands.
South Downs: bells ring out to celebrate Britain's new national park [Guardian.co.uk], by Stephen Bates (March 31, 2011)
In pictures: The UK's newest national park [Guardian.co.uk], (March 31, 2009)
"South Downs Way", "Looking after", "Interactive Map" (Southdowns National Park Authority, March 2011)
"The South Downs above Tilton." by penwren [Flickr] (May 21, 2009)
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