Just half an hour’s bus ride from the centre of Brighton takes you to Devil’s Dyke, the longest and deepest dry valley in the UK. With stunning vistas over Sussex and beyond to Surrey, Hampshire and Kent, it’s a place to get away from the everyday world.
Formed over 10,000 years ago in the Ice Age, Devil’s Dyke is full of history and legend. As well as the ramparts of an Iron Age hill fort and signs of a medieval settlement, there are remains of a Victorian funfair, a funicular railway and Britain’s first cable car.
Flowers and insects also flourish on the chalk soil of the Dyke. Large areas of chalk grassland are rare internationally as well as in the UK, which makes it vital to maintain and support. Restoring this fragile landscape through the National Trust (NT) Changing Chalk projects is helping to increase the abundance of wildflowers and biodiversity of the site. A guided walk with local rangers as part of a Devil’s Dyke free events week provided an exciting hands-on opportunity to learn more.
Braving the elements
As the rain lashed the 77 bus on the steep climb up to the Dyke, I hastily pulled on my waterproof trousers and anorak and made ready for a wild, wet walk. The man sitting opposite, wearing only a t-shirt and shorts, looked anxious.
He was lucky (partly), though he had no need of his bottle of sun cream. The rain subsided to an occasional drizzle, but the wind continued to whip the hillsides and I was glad of the extra layers. Hard to believe that I had been wearing summer dresses only a few days before.
Yet any thoughts of the weather subsided in the face of the breathtaking panorama that lay below me. Small wonder that John Constable described this as “the grandest view in the world”. There was just a hint of a rainbow above the hills too.
Wildlife partnerships
The bus had been crowded so I was expecting a good number to join the guided walk, but the two NT rangers were only joined by me and two others: a local farmer and a NT volunteer.
I was glad of my walking poles as we set off down the steep, rocky hillside. A group of young cows were grazing along the bottom of the Dyke. The nearby farm is one of the Changing Chalk partners; the cattle, together with sheep and Dartmoor ponies, help to keep invasive brambles and gorse from overwhelming the slower growing plants.
One of the rangers spotted a well-camouflaged Small Heath butterfly hovering close to the path, while a delicate Green-veined White butterfly struggled to take off in the wind above our heads. But the highlight was an unmistakable flash of brilliant blue – the rare Adonis Blue, a chalk grassland butterfly which feeds on horseshoe vetch.
The rangers told us about the strange symbiotic relationship between Adonis larvae and yellow ants, which feed on the honey-like secretions of the caterpillars and even hide the pupa underground until the butterflies emerge in the spring.
An abundance of flowers
The highlight of the walk for me was enjoying the many wildflowers that grow mainly on the Dyke’s sunnier south-facing slopes. This biodiverse landscape can support up to 40 different species of plants per square metre. Over the next hour and a half, we found and identified more than 20. Of course many, such as yellow rattle, round-headed rampion (Sussex’s county flower) and common spotted orchids had finished flowering, but their seedheads (especially rattle) were everywhere you looked.
I rediscovered my love of wildflowers during Covid lockdowns and spent many hours walking round Hollingbury fort near where I live which, though smaller, has very similar chalk grassland to the Dyke. The names of the flowers themselves are highly evocative: pink restharrow, whose roots could ‘arrest’ a harrow; soft yellow lady’s bedstraw, traditionally used to stuff women’s mattresses; and birdsfoot trefoil, sometimes known as ‘bacon and eggs’ because of its yellow and orange flowers, whose seedheads look like a bird’s claw.
Seeing into the life of things
Suddenly Rebecca, one of the rangers who was very eagle-eyed, called out in excitement. She had seen a small cluster of autumn gentian. This beautiful mauve flower was just coming into bud. We must have been a strange sight: five anorak-clad figures crouching round a small plant on the wind-swept hillside. But we were transfixed. In that moment, in Wordsworth’s words, “With an eye made quiet by the power of harmony…we see into the life of things.”
My flask of tea was very welcome after the walk. Perched on a stile, I ate lunch in the blustery wind before reluctantly catching the bus back to the city, my mind still full of wonderful sights.
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