Train: Take the 9:54 AM Southern service from London Victoria (10:01 Clapham Junction and 10:10 East Croydon), arriving Lewes at 10:56. Return trains from Seaford are half hourly at 24 and 53 past the hour. Buy a day return to Seaford.
Distance: 13.9 miles/22.3 km with shorter options available -- see the walk notes.
Difficulty: 7 out of 10
This walk is mainly along ridges and offers superb downland views throughout with an excellent lunchtime pub. The beauty of this walk is that you can see the way ahead so direction finding is fairly easy. In addition to the fine views throughout, this walk offers the reward of a cooling dip in the sea when you arrive at the waterfront in Bishopstone. More information and the walk directions can be found here.
Lunch: The recommended lunch stop is the Ram Inn in West Firle 5.5 miles (9km) into the walk.
Tea: Various options in Seaford.....including the lovely pub on the station!
T=swc.181
L=swc.181
3 comments:
N=17 on this walk. Stargazer will do a proper report which I am not trying to pre-empt, but I am stating the number because I want to have a rant about the Ram Inn and have that included in the official report for the reference of future walkers and walk posters.
Two tables had initially been booked here, one for eight and one for four. At the start of the walk only six or seven walkers indicated their interest in a pub lunch, so the table for four was cancelled. In the event (as is the way of things in the SWC….) ten or eleven wanted lunch, so we needed an overflow table.
The pub was nearly empty inside and only half full on the patio. The whole time we were there, two or three waiting staff were standing around chatting with apparently nothing to do. Yet the overflow table was told its food order could not be taken for half an hour so as “not to overload the kitchen”. On the table for 8, booked for 1.15pm, our food order was not taken for 25 minutes either, waiting staff enjoying a nice chat nearby instead. We had to go and badger them to take both drink and food orders. Each time they took an order, the waiter had a rant about us turning up with too many people, despite those of us on the table for eight pointing out that we at least had booked and might therefore expect to have prompt service.
The people on the relief table gave up in the end (after waiting about 45 minutes) and left without having had any food. On our table the food came in reasonable time once ordered and was nice enough. I found the menu weird, however, and struggled to find anything I wanted to eat. I moan about too many pubs falling back in burgers and fish and chips, but this was the opposite.
This pub used to be busy. It is now half full on a gorgeous sunny Saturday. The management might want to reflect on this. They might want to wonder why they employ surplus waiting staff to stand around chatting when their kitchen is overburdened even when their establishment is half full.
Hopefully the current owners will go bust soon and a new management will come in. Meantime I would have suggested those doing this walk go to the Trevor Arms in Glynde: this looked busy as we passed but I am told has the same owner as the Ram. So instead I recommend the Steamworks on Glynde station. A charming place with friendly staff and competitively priced home-cooked food. A place that won’t make you feel like an unwelcome nuisance when you turn up to do business with them.
Many years ago with a group of SWC walkers the Ram Inn completely forgot about ou r food order leading to us
wasting around 2 hours before setting off for Alfriston for food
No "official" walk report for this walk has appeared as of Monday morning, so I am going to provide one....
As stated previously N=17 on this walk on a warm w=sunny day: one could not have picked a better walk for the weather conditions or better weather conditions for the walk. 13 alighted from the (these days always very busy) train to Lewes, and we picked up two ne'er-do-wells lounging at a coffee shop in the town. Another joined at Glynde, I think, plus one of the original thirteen also took a train to Glynde to shorten the walk. Lastly and not at all leastly, our walk poster overcame multiple transport failures, some of an international nature, to join us by taking a taxi to the top of the downs just after lunch.
Our travails in the lunch pub are documented in (too much?) detail in an earlier comment. Otherwise the walk was a delight. The grass has recovered its greenery as if there had never been a drought. In the fields before Glynde it looked as lush and cheerful as in May. The downs were their magnificent selves, especially on the gorgeous descent to Glynde, with that wonderful view in front of us.
Two of us ended at Southease in the afternoon, in my case to have a slightly shorter walk, in my companion's to be reunited with his car. The two of us drove to Bishopstone. I had been nervous about whether the sea would be too rough for swimming, but in fact it was perfectly tolerable: exciting without being worrying. We both had a swim and then went to the yacht club cafe/bar, where we found a number of other walkers having drinks on the terrace.
The backmarkers soon turned up and there then was a mass move back to the beach for a (in my case, second) swim. I did not count, but around eight of us went in, enjoying a refreshing dip.
We then had another drink at the yacht club, a golden walk to Seaford, and got fish and chips at Trawlers. These we consumed on the 7.24 train, washed down by entirely appropriate quantities of shop-bought refreshments.
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