Country walk: West Dean Downs
These eight miles (13 kms) across farm and forest of the South Downs will set you up with all the exercise you’ll need for a week. Most of the walk is across the West Dean Estate, although we start and finish near Goodwood’s grandstand and the car park at the Trundle. The grid reference is SU879113.
The Chichester to Midhurst No. 60 bus also serves this walk from Singleton every half hour. Cross the busy main road, climb southward up-slope onto the green Iron Age ramparts of this magnificent hill fort and circulate along its path, when views across the Solent and the Downs give you an eagle’s-eye view of the South Country.
At the western edge of the embankments, as you enjoy a sight of West Dean’s arboretum with the tallest Douglas firs in England, take the track down-hill to another carpark, cross the minor road while keeping on the Monarch’s Way and descend to West Dean village along the flint wall.
Cross the River Lavant and follow the trickle for 200 yards and turn left up the village street, finding the tea rooms and shop next to The Dean public house. Cross the A286 past the village school, trot under the ancient railway bridge next to the tunnel, finding a rough stone track to the left, and stay on this for a mile, passing Lodge Hill Farm, crossing the Roman road, when you come to Hylters Lane, where you turn right.
You have passed through red kite and buzzard country, with woods which are full of wild orchids and blackcap warblers, while the farmland hedges are home to yellowhammers and linnets.
A century ago, this farmland was uncultivated chalk heath and the haunt of stonechats, nightjars and skylarks, but all have gone now. There was a Roman building near the track junction with the minor road, visible now only as a small grass-grown hollow. Hylters Lane leads you northeast to a road junction, which you cross on to the cinder track through a gateway.
The track was specially constructed 120 years ago, so that King Edward could be driven along it during pheasant shooting days. Hundreds of tons of cinders were brought here by rail and horse and cart from the Welsh coal mines. Open country to your right may give you a view of a hare, a red kite or a few skylarks. On your left was once a medieval rabbit warren.
At the woods, take first right on the bridleway, south, past Colworth Farm. The name may derive from the fact that there was a charcoal-burners’ kiln here, although another possible is that an Anglo Saxon called Cula was a landowner. ‘Worth’ means an enclosed homestead.
A minor road takes you past the farm, when a footpath sign on the left takes you eastward to a T-junction after 200 yards, where you turn right alongside Puttocks Copse - the ancient name for a buzzard. This takes you over Hat Hill, down into Singleton village, where there is another pub and another tea shop and a church with scars on its stone pillars made by Crusaders’ graffiti.
The Blessed Virgin Mary also has a telling memorial to a master of fox hounds: ‘Unpleasant truth ... Death hunts us from our birth, in view; and Men like Foxes, take to Earth’.
Singleton derives from the Saxon ‘sengel’ (singe), meaning a burnt clearing in the woods. A footpath from the church now ascends over the fields past Manor Farm, uphill, back to the Trundle.