South Downs: England's Mountains Green

In the heart of southern England,

Britain's newest national park rises out of the ocean.

The South Downs.

Its rolling hills stirred William Blake to write the words

for the Jerusalem anthem.

This ancient land has been shaped by people

since the end of the last ice age.

As I journey through the seasons,

I'll be exploring its rich history, landscapes and wildlife.

Look at this.

It's one of the most iconic views...

on the planet.

And I'll be meeting with the people who live and work

in England's mountains green.

They've got this own... Like when I grew up.

I arrived in the South Downs ten years ago

to take up a new post as a parish priest.

And the moment I got out of the car, I knew I'd found her.

I knew I'd found...home.

I felt very deeply that this was where I belonged.

I've been working here ever since,

serving three little parishes at the eastern end

of these windswept hills.

I spend all my spare time walking the South Downs.

It's my passion, and I've come to know them well.

They start at the Seven Sisters Cliffs, near Eastbourne.

Stretching over 100 miles west,

they pass through rare chalk grasslands...

..ancient forests...

..and flooded river valleys.

At their western end, they give way to the ancient city of Winchester.

My journey follows the entire length of these hills

along the South Downs Way,

and it begins close to my home on Firle Beacon at the end of winter.

This whole area was once a huge dome of chalk

created by the same tectonic forces

that pushed the Alps and the Himalayas up out of the ground.

And at the end of the last ice age,

a huge swathe of meltwater carved out the heart of the Downs,

leaving the Thames Valley to the north,

and, here, the South Downs.

When man returned after the last ice age 10,000 years ago,

he would have walked along this ridge,

which is now the South Downs Way,

and he must have thought, "This is paradise."

There was fresh water coming up out of the ground

through the chalk aquifers,

the rivers would have been full of fish,

and the forest, which stretched down on the side of these slopes,

would have been game,

and of course there was flint to create arrowheads for hunting.

Around 7,000 years ago,

Neolithic man began to clear the forest for grazing

and to build his first settlements.

Evidence of early human existence is laid bare all across the Downs.

Some of the most important ancient sites in Britain are found here.

The South Downs' rich history, landscapes and wildlife

was finally recognised in 2010

when it became Britain's newest national park.

SHEEP BLEAT

What makes the South Downs so special

is that this land has been shaped by people,

and that their relationship with it has continued, unbroken,

right to the present day.

It's early March, and I've come to help local sheep farmer Andrew Barr

bring the ewes off the hill into the lambing barns.

Come on! Baa!

Baa!

The idea is to sound like an old ram, so the sheep come to you.

That's my call from a sheep.

It hurts your throat when you've got a sore throat!

Baa!

Without sheep, the chalk grasslands that dominate the eastern end

of the Downs would not exist.

Their constant grazing keeps woodland at bay,

and has done for thousands of years.

It's created one of the rarest landscapes on earth.

When I came here, I thought I'd gone to heaven.

I thought, yeah, just exactly where I want to be.

And I never actually meant to stay here, but...I'm still here.

I've been working with Andrew for ten years at lambing time.

We're getting everything ready to go,

and you get the sense that everything is about to bloom.

I started lambing when I was a boy.

I was 16.

Yeah, it really got a hold of me

and it never loses its wonder, its excitement.

DOG BARKS

Yep, she's lambing. You can see a little white foot.

They start to go round in circles and make themselves a nest.

They stargaze, they look up at the sky,

and I suppose that's all straining themselves to start getting the idea

of pushing the lamb out.

Here we go. Here we go.

And, eventually, she'll start talking to the lamb,

and the lamb will start talking to her,

and those two things get imprinted on their brain,

their memory, so they know that little, "'Baa' - that's my lamb."

-They all look the same, but they've all got their own...

-HE BLEATS

They've all got their own particular,

individual sound and smell.

It's sheep more than anything

that are responsible for the kind of even green... SHEEP BLEATS

The even green... SHEEP BLEATS

It's all right. It's OK.

..on the hills of the South Downs.

And this tradition has been carrying on for thousands of years,

and long may it thrive. Long may it thrive.

Sunlight touches the head of the Long Man of Wilmington.

Recent evidence suggests it was made in the 16th century,

but some locals believe it dates back to Neolithic times

and that this moment marked the beginning of spring.

As the days lengthen, the rich green covers these hills again.

But this is a fragile landscape.

Only a thin layer of soil,

in places no more than a few centimetres thick,

covers the chalk.

The chalk was formed over 65 million years ago

when this was an ancient seabed.

It is made from the shells of microscopic algae called coccoliths

which sank to the sea floor,

leaving vast chalk deposits made of the mineral calcite.

Rain soaks fast into the highly porous chalk,

creating a landscape that dries out very quickly.

Yet the South Downs is one of the richest and most diverse landscapes

in Britain.

The open chalk downland is found almost exclusively

in southern England.

The dry soils provide the perfect conditions

for some of Britain's rarest and most beautiful plants to flourish.

About 30 species of orchid are found here, including the bee orchids.

The petals of orchids perfectly mimic the bees,

wasps and other insects that pollinate them.

What a beautiful morning.

I'm standing here just above the Cuckmere Valley

and I've come to meet one of the country's leading experts

on butterflies, Neil Hulme.

This is our version of the rainforest.

The diversity of plants is absolutely fantastic.

It's a very, very rich environment,

and it's so rich because the soil, it's what we call a skeletal soil,

it's very, very low in nutrients

so these things are really having to compete.

This chalk downland is unique.

It is, but it takes an awful long time.

This has taken thousands of years to form.

It's the sheer number of different plants.

You know, we're talking 40 species here in a tiny area, a square metre.

We're talking 30 species at any one time of butterfly.

-Get that!

-Oh, yes.

-Look!

There we go.

When you see the Adonis blue, you know it's the Adonis blue.

Yeah, the colour, it would not look out of place

in a South American rainforest.

They are as good as anything, anywhere in the world.

If you said Adonis blue, corn bunting,

yellowhammer, chalkhill blue,

you know you're talking about the South Downs. Absolutely.

-It's that suite of species which is unique to this landscape.

-Mmm.

But the Adonis is...

-The jewel.

-It's the jewel in the crown.

They should be prescribed by the National Health Service.

They just bring instant happiness.

They raise your spirits.

The caterpillar of the Adonis blue butterfly

has a special relationship with ants.

They protect it from parasites and small predators.

In return, when the ants tap them with their antenna,

the caterpillar feeds them with a tiny drop of sugar.

It's a win-win situation for both.

The ancient Greeks used psyche to refer both to the butterfly

and the soul.

And, for me, it's a passion, it's a love, a deep love affair,

and it's an important connection, I think.

Put it there. Put it there.

Across Britain, butterflies are in steep decline

and the Downs are a critical refuge for them.

But 80% of these grasslands have been lost in the last 70 years.

During the Second World War, with our supply routes under siege,

they were ploughed up to feed the nation

in the Dig For Britain campaign.

It changed the face of the South Downs faster than at any time

in recent history.

The impact of the war is evident all across the national park.

Nowhere more so than the Cuckmere Valley, close to the Seven Sisters.

Look at this.

It's one of the most iconic views in Britain.

It's one of the greatest sights on the planet.

And it is entrenched, it's seared onto the British psyche.

We thought that this was where the Germans might land.

This beach was heavily surveyed by the Luftwaffe

during the Second World War,

in preparation for a German landing force.

And the architecture of the Second World War

still very much remains.

There are tank traps here,

and on either side of the River Ouse, there are pillboxes.

And this whole river valley stretching out in front of me here,

this would have been lit at night during the Second World War

to fool the Luftwaffe into dropping their bombs here

rather than on the strategically important port of Newhaven,

which lies some four miles to the west along the cliffs.

Whoa!

It is hard to imagine that, 72 years ago,

a couple of men would have been standing where I'm standing.

They would have had a machinegun in front of them,

waiting for their worst nightmares to arrive from across the sea.

And in all the villages along the Downs,

there were local volunteers that formed part of suicide squads

called the auxiliary units,

and their job was to hold the line in case the Germans invaded.

The South Downs has always been at the front line

against armies intent on conquering Britain.

Its beaches and its hills are riddled with defences.

Centuries earlier, in about 870AD,

King Alfred's army marched from Winchester across these hills

and established a chain of ports to repel the Vikings and the Danes.

But their history here goes back much further.

There are the remains of several major ancient settlements

along the South Downs Way.

This Iron Age hill fort at Cissbury is over 2,000 years old.

It is the largest Iron Age hill fort on the South Downs.

Men moved by hand 30,000 tonnes of chalk to construct this place.

These ramparts would have had ten foot high wooden walls

completely surrounding the entire fortress.

But this wasn't a place of aggression.

This was a place of protection.

This was a place where the local farmers stored their foods

from the raiding parties of other Iron Age tribes

looking for easy pickings.

And, if the farmers had their food stolen, they would have starved,

so they went to all of this trouble to protect their families

and their livelihood and their land.

But there is something else here that drew early man to the Downs,

and it is pivotal to the history of Britain.

Cissbury is also home to the remains of over 270 mines.

It's probably one of the first industrial landscapes that we have

in Britain, and a lot of people were going to a lot of trouble

to find just one thing.

Flint.

A man was probably sitting on the banks of this pit 6,000 years ago

napping up arrowheads, spearheads, axes, knives, skinning tools.

And these mines, went down... some of them went down 12 metres.

And, underneath where I'm standing,

there would have been shafts that fed into the ground horizontally

that were mined, they were dug out using antler horn.

And most of those shafts, probably, if they haven't caved in,

still exist.

They were after not the first seam of flint in the ground,

or the second,

but the third, and the fourth, and the fifth seam,

because the flint was more workable, it was more malleable.

People would have come here to trade.

Flints from here have been found as far afield as East Anglia.

This was wealth.

This was the gold of its day.

Ever since Neolithic times,

the South Downs has been shaped by people.

Recent evidence from aerial surveys has found that prehistoric man

was cultivating huge swathes of this land as far back as 3,000 years ago.

The field systems, many of which are now covered by woods,

suggests that there was a highly-organised civilisation

in existence here.

As old as ancient Egypt,

could these verdant hills have been the ancient heart of Britain?

Today, our relationship with the land continues to evolve.

With its dry, chalky soil,

and more sunlight than anywhere else in Britain,

a new industry is emerging on the Downs.

It's summer, and winemaker Peter Hall is hard at work

at the Breaky Bottom Vineyard.

It took my breath away when I came over the hill,

because it was a Wuthering Heights without the coldness.

I did fall head over heels in love with it straightaway.

Yeah.

Peter arrived here 50 years ago.

And I found a tiny cottage here.

Derelict, broken windows.

And I asked the governor, could I live there?

He said, there's no electricity, no telephone,

just a stand-pipe for water outside.

I said, that's all fine by me.

So, as a 30-year-old bachelor,

I was able to come here and live here on my own, and I loved it.

Peter was one of the pioneers of the English winemaking industry

in the '70s.

And it's almost exclusively sparkling wine.

Champagne method sparkling wine.

Really, what we've got is a very similar climate to Champagne,

which is the northernmost region in France for growing grapes,

and similar geology and soil type.

Well, these are Chardonnay,

so they're the white grape from Champagne.

These are predominantly the ones that are planted in the UK,

along with Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier...

..which are black grapes.

All have white juice, of course,

so your champagne is often a blend of all three of those.

Or a blend of two of them.

Today, the South Downs has about 40 wine producers

and many are international award winners.

I'm bottling before I harvest my next lot.

They've had some sugar put in and some more yeast,

and the yeast will say, "Wake up!"

So the alcohol will go up from about 11

to about 12.1, 12.2, something like that.

Which is just what you want.

And, of course, you get huge pressure,

six atmospheres of pressure, building up.

So that is the real champagne. That's...

Yeah, wonderful.

People have always been drawn to the South Downs.

Many great writers and artists have been inspired by this place.

Tennyson, Kipling, Hilaire Belloc, Jane Austen, just to name a few.

And, in the early 1900s,

the Bloomsbury Group would gather for their early meetings

in Charleston Farmhouse, which is just over that brow there.

An influential group of writers,

philosophers and artists, that included Virginia Woolf,

her sister Vanessa Bell, and Duncan Grant.

They painted everything they could get their hands on.

The tables, the chairs, the piano.

Their liberal attitude was a strong reaction

to the strict Victorian view of the world that existed at the time,

and their art reflected the softness,

beauty and intense femininity

of these gently-rolling hills.

There is something in the light, there is something in the soil here

that really just gives you a sense of freedom.

And I think that is what attracted so many to this place.

I was speaking to a man in Firle yesterday

who used to live in London,

and I said, "Are you thinking about moving?" And he said,

"No, they're going to have to carry me out of this place in a box."

And that's how I feel about it.

As I follow the South Downs Way west towards the middle of the park,

much of the landscape turns to woodland.

Just north of Chichester is Kingley Vale,

one of Britain's most spectacular ancient woods.

These yew trees are thought to be over 2,000 years old.

Katherine Birch from Natural England is the reserve manager.

So, the yew trees were very special here.

You get these really gnarled, twisted,

ancient shapes which create this sort of wild feeling to the place.

People call this tree The Octopus, reaching out with its arms,

and it's all twisted and fluid and moving.

It's probably one of my favourite trees on the reserve.

It's really beautiful.

And you can see there, the blood red where the bark comes away.

This is just part of the natural colouration of the tree.

And the story goes that there was a great battle with the Vikings,

and the men of Chichester came out and fought them,

and the men of Chichester won the battle here,

and the Viking blood ran into the ground,

and that blood now runs through the yew trees.

People do say the trees here come alive and move around at night.

This is another male yew tree,

and what's really special about this tree,

which is known as The Grandfather Tree,

is that you see how it's put a branch down...

..and it's rooted itself back into the ground here,

and then produced another generation, the next generation.

And then it's rooted itself again in the ground,

and produced another generation.

So there's three generations

all still attached to this original male tree.

The male trees also produce pollen to fertilise the female yews

in the forest.

Once a year, over just a few days,

they release their pollen together.

And Kingley Vale erupts in clouds of yellow smoke.

A lot of the myths about the trees being immortal,

they live for such a long time, they're slow growing,

you can see why they're kind of associated with this eternal life.

This ancient lands throws up constant reminders of our past.

Here, close to Chichester,

the South Downs became a key area for the Roman invasion

of Britain in 43AD.

And I'm standing on what would have been one of the first Roman roads

to be built in the British Isles, Stane Street.

You can see Chichester basking in sunlight,

but it's thought that Chichester harbour was a key staging post

for the Roman invasion of Britain,

and that this road would have supplied the Roman military machine

as it marched north.

This 6km section,

running through the National Trust Slindon Estate,

is one of the best-preserved pieces of Roman road in the country.

At its height,

it would have been just under 7.5 metres wide

and this central section here, this was called the agger.

This would have taken the ox carts carrying the really heavy goods.

And, either side of the agger,

there would have been two lanes for the lighter traffic,

the horses and the pedestrians.

But this was a major highway running from the harbour to London,

carrying supplies, military equipment,

but also food - cheese, Parma ham, truffles and wine.

This whole area around Chichester became a very important stronghold

for the Romans.

Roman farms, houses and palaces have all been unearthed around here.

They also introduced brown hares and rabbits,

pheasants and stinging nettles.

The soldiers were said to have flogged themselves with the nettles

to stimulate blood flow,

and keep themselves warm in the cold northern winters.

BIRD CHIRPS

Centuries later, when William the Conqueror invaded England in 1066,

many of the forests in this part of the Downs

were declared royal hunting grounds for the Norman kings.

And they remained a haven for wildlife

for hundreds of years after.

It was in these wooded Downs in the 18th century

that one of our greatest naturalist, Reverend Gilbert White,

transformed our view of the natural world

and how we see ourselves within it.

His home was here in Selborne,

close to the northern boundary of the park.

He lived in the 1700s, well before Darwin,

when nature was considered as something that should be ruled over,

controlled and tamed.

Gilbert White was the first to challenge that view.

The original manuscript of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne,

and this writing, these words, have changed the world.

Before Gilbert White,

no-one had written in detail about the natural world.

No-one had gone outside and sat down, and looked, and listened

and been able, from that,

to deduce the separation between species and the intimacies of genus.

Gilbert White spent hours in these woods observing detail.

He was the first to identify the differences

between the willow warbler,

the wood warbler and the chiffchaff by their song.

He identified the harvest mouse as a separate species.

He must have been here at night,

because he identified the noctule bat as a separate species.

Really, he laid the foundation stone for the study of natural history

and the environmental movement as we know it today,

to such an extent that Charles Darwin declared that he stood

on the shoulders of Gilbert White.

At the western end of the South Downs,

the park fans out north across an area known as the Weald.

It's a very different landscape with its own unique wildlife and history.

Look at this!

This is Blackdown Hill.

It's the highest point in Sussex,

and it's a part of the national park that I was completely unaware of.

This habitat was created by meltwater from the last ice age,

which has eroded all the chalk, just leaving clay and acidic greensand.

And that has created this rare habitat called lowland heath.

And the kings and the lords that owned this land

would have probably given it away,

let it out to the locals to graze their cattle,

because the agricultural value here is pretty minimal.

The name "heathen" actually stems from those who would have lived

and worked on this land.

Imagine what they must have been like.

With its rare mix of dry heathland and ponds,

this part of the Weald is of great value to wildlife.

It is the only area in Britain that can claim to have all 12 native

species of amphibians and reptiles.

And just a couple of miles from here, on Marley Common,

I'm hoping to find Britain's only venomous snake.

Senior ranger Matt Bramich, from the National Trust,

and biologist Lucy Struthers

have been tagging and tracking the adders here for two years.

-We haven't caught this one before.

-OK.

-So we are quite excited.

-Oh, yes. Is it a female?

-Yes.

Isn't she lovely?

-How old do you think she is?

-They can live up to 30 years.

-I didn't know that.

-No.

-I didn't know that!

Amazing.

And she will give birth in late August, September.

Then she goes on a month-long feeding frenzy

before retiring to hibernate.

-Typically, she'll be underground for six months.

-Wow.

45g.

Once the tag is on, what information are you hoping to garner?

This year, I'm hoping to establish where they go to post-breeding.

That would be a really important thing for us,

as land managers, to know about.

The adders travel between their feeding and breeding areas

on the pockets of heathland across the Weald.

By understanding where they're going,

Matt hopes to better protect them and the wildlife corridors

they need to maintain a healthy population.

Very neat!

In Australia, I saw a snake on the ground and I said to the guy,

"What happens if that bites you?"

And he said, "If that one bites you, you just sit down and have a smoke."

THEY LAUGH

What a way to go.

It's time for her to go back to her world now.

So I'm just going to put her down.

There she goes!

Oh! Wasn't that beautiful?

With its thick clay and acid soils,

the Weald was of little value to man and it remained sparsely inhabited

for thousands of years.

But that changed in the 16th century,

when something of great value was found in the ground.

Time has a way of hiding histories.

Looking out here, it's hard to imagine

that during the 16th century, this was a hive of activity.

There are three things here that are critical to the beginning

of the iron industry in Britain.

First of all, there was water to drive the bellows.

Secondly, there was wood for charcoal.

And, lastly, this is the most important ingredient,

this is iron ore,

and it was probably dug up no more than three miles away from here.

Right here, at the Fernhurst Furnace,

and on 15 other sites in the western Weald,

this was the place that seeded the Industrial Revolution.

It produced the best iron in the country,

where the cannon were made that defeated the Armada,

from the water in the ponds, the charcoal from the trees

and this little beauty from the ground.

I'm standing on what would have been the furnace.

In front of me, there would have been two huge water wheels

and they would have powered two massive 15 foot bellows,

feeding air into the bottom of this furnace

to generate the heat needed to melt the iron ore.

And this went on 24 hours a day for well over 200 years.

Nearby, just eight miles to the east on Ebernoe Common,

the heathland of the Weald mixes with woodland

to create one of the richest habitats in Europe.

In the open forest, where sunlight reaches the ground,

there's an incredible diversity of plants and insects.

Fungus runs rampant in the warm

and often damp glades, and fallen trees rot more quickly.

It provides the perfect food for the grubs of creatures,

like this rare hornet beetle.

The beetle lays its eggs in the dead wood.

Its stripes and jerky movements are thought to mimic the hornet

it's named after, and ward off potential predators.

The trees also provide shelter for some creatures

that only emerge after dark.

Ebernoe Common is a world hot spot for bats.

An amazing 15 of the 18 species of bats found in Britain live here,

including the very rare Bechstein and barbastelle bats.

One of the UK's leading bat experts, Steph Murphy,

has been tracking them for more than ten years.

Using this fine net, she has a few minutes to catch,

tag and release them,

so any stress is kept to a minimum.

So, this is a lovely female barbastelle.

Aren't they beautiful?

-They almost look quite pug-faced.

-Yeah.

So, the ears join at the base, and...

So, that's quite an identifying feature, as we can see.

She has had a baby this year, so she's got a dependant young

at the moment, so, as you can see, she's quite clearly lactating.

And they're quite a dark, blackish colour.

They are, they're dark.

When were they first discovered here?

It was about 2000.

Extraordinary. I mean, how long had they been here before that?

Oh, probably before we were.

-I mean, I just find that so wonderful...

-Yeah.

..that in the year 2000 we make a discovery like this...

-Yes.

-..here.

Why Ebernoe Common?

Well, in this part of Sussex,

it's quite a unique wooded landscape.

It's connected across the South Downs,

that provides lots of roosting habitat,

foraging habitat.

You have everything in one landscape.

-It's not disturbed.

-How far away are their feeding grounds?

They have been recorded up to 25km.

They go quite a distance.

-So, they're flying 25km...

-Yes.

-..out and back every night?

They're doing a 50-mile round trip?

It's pretty extraordinary for a small bat to do that.

So, habitat connectivity such as tree lines

and hedgerows and water courses

are very important, and enable these bats

to navigate from their roost sites to their feeding grounds.

Of course.

'Fitting the bat with a tiny transmitter,

'Steph hopes to learn more about where they're roosting,

'and protect their breeding sites.'

OK, so she needs to fly now.

-She needs to fly now. She's, em...

-Yeah, right.

And I think she's probably quite hungry. There you go.

There we are. Whoa!

There she is!

And there's the tawny owl on cue.

Absolutely. SHE LAUGHS

-A lot of people get freaked out by being in the woods at night.

-Oh, no.

It's much scarier being in central Brighton on a Friday night than...

SHE LAUGHS

Let's just call them different environments!

THEY LAUGH

Well, what an amazing night.

To see the barbastelles, to see that they're breeding,

to see them alive and healthy and flying -

what a privilege. What a privilege.

Across the South Downs Park, summer is drawing to a close.

The farmers are bringing in the last of the crops.

With more than 80% of the park now farm,

the wild areas that remain and the corridors that connect them

are not just important refuges for wildlife,

they're also important to people,

and have been for thousands of years.

It's the last week of September.

In the morning, the grass is heavy with dew,

the leaves are beginning to change colour

and the bushes are ripe with haws,

and elderberries, sloes and damsons.

I'm here to meet Lucinda Warner, who's a herbalist,

and who knows every flower and berry and leaf on the Downs.

Today, she's gathering berries from hawthorns.

Here on the Downs, we get lots of these beautiful lone hawthorns.

It berries so profusely,

and it's full of these wonderful starches

that would have been so important for our ancestors.

Starch was one of the hardest foods, those kind of staples,

for them to come across.

Well, I think there's actually a massive resurgence

in interest in foraging and

herbal medicine and wild foods.

And I think a lot of that is because...

I mean, you can see just being out here that the medicine

is not just in the taking of the substance,

it's in the picking, it's in the harvesting,

it's in the being with the plants.

The whole process becomes the medicine, really.

We've got so many beautiful plants here,

we're so lucky in the Downs that we have so many wild flowers

growing on the chalk.

Yarrow is a really great example of that.

-And then we've also got selfheal here.

-Mm.

-This one's gone past flowering now...

-Uh-huh.

-..but just the name,

the fact that our ancestors chose to call it selfheal

says how much it was valued, really.

And, so, to our ancestors, this was a medicine chest?

Absolutely. I mean, everything had a use, it had a sacredness.

Some for food, some for medicine,

-some for tinder, some for shelter.

-Mm.

I think, today, we talk very much about this idea of

-reconnecting with nature...

-Mm.

-..but I think, to our ancestors,

that would have been a laughable notion because...

-HE LAUGHS

-..the idea that we weren't nature...

-Yeah.

-..would have been a completely alien one.

Across the Downs, autumn takes hold.

For wine grower Peter Hall, it's time to pick the grapes.

We've had such good sunshine this summer,

this is the...

culmination of one of the best years I've ever known, actually.

Yeah... I think if you're...

Oh, hello. I take all the help as it comes.

We must have, maybe,

nearly 20 people picking today.

Now, I think we do need another bucket.

Don't you think?

It's a wonderful atmosphere.

Well, some... I mean, Richard has been with me since the start.

In fact, I went to school with Richard.

-We never argue, do we?

-No, no, never.

Never fall out.

I'm going to turn the press.

BELL RINGS

We have the support of our friends and family

and we don't pay them but we give them

a really nice lunch...

and that's an important part of why they come, actually.

This sort of lifts your spirits,

that such nice people come and they help you,

and then they feel part of the wine, as well.

And, you know, they use it in their own lives, because they might use it

for their weddings or their christenings.

We're so small, but we're an important part of this community.

We love each other.

I say it with a full smile.

And we work well as a team.

Without that, I think it would be impossible, yeah.

Impossible to work.

As winter draws near, the first storms roll in,

battering the Seven Sisters.

Every three years,

almost a metre of these cliffs are taken by the waves

as they reclaim this ancient seabed.

Winter visitors start to arrive.

Bewick's swans fly in

more than 2,500 miles from Siberia.

They'll overwinter in the flooded river valleys.

Short-eared owls arrive from their breeding grounds

as far away as Scandinavia and Iceland.

They'll stay here for six months,

hunting for mice and voles along the hedgerows.

In the forests,

woodsman coppice hazel and birch for fencing and to make charcoal,

keeping the forests open for wildlife to flourish.

On the chalk grasslands in the eastern Downs,

rangers and volunteers turn to clearing the scrub,

keeping the woods at bay, just as it has been done since Neolithic times,

7,000 years ago.

The South Downs is a landscape that has been shaped by people,

and it has in turn shaped the people that have lived here.

For me, it is without doubt one of the most beautiful landscapes

that I know.

And, as life turns inwards across its rolling hills,

the words of one of the Downland's greatest poets,

Hilaire Belloc, echo in my ears.

"If I ever become a rich man

"or if ever I grow to be old...

"..I will build a house with deep thatch

"to shelter me from the cold

"And there shall the Sussex songs be sung

"and the story of Sussex told.

"I will hold my house in the high wood

"within a walk of the sea.

"And the men that were boys when I was a boy

"shall sit and drink with me."

As winter takes grip, the first snows begin to fall.

# I never mind the wind Or the driving rain... #

In my local, it's folk night.

# Or the driving rain... #

Some of the Downland songs date back to Saxon times.

# Tis my pleasure... #

Their music and words passed on through the ages.

# Oh, of this island I am made

# Oh, of this island I am made. #

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

As the winter snow and rain seeps into the chalk,

hundreds of springs across the Downs come to life.

They flow into several rivers that have carved valleys

through the South Downs.

As water levels rise, the rivers spill across the flood plains,

creating some of the most important wetlands in northern Europe.

In the Arun Valley, Bewick's swans, with their distinctive yellow beaks,

spend the winter grazing on water plants and grass.

In the western Downs,

the springs flow out across the chalklands

to create a very different kind of river.

Here is the source of two very special rivers.

The Rother, which begins at the base of Grandfather's Bottom, just there,

and the Meon, on the other side of the valley.

Fed by springs all year round,

the Meon flows a short 21 miles down into the Solent.

Its clear waters are under pressure from fertiliser and farm waste

that leach into the river,

but Nick Heasman of the South Downs National Park Authority

has been working with the local community to clean it up.

The rain comes down on top of those Downs,

it filters through that chalk and it comes out purified by the chalk

and we end up with crystal-clear... They call this gin-clear water.

Some hydrologists think that some of this water coming passed us now

in the river might have fallen 60 years ago

and it has taken all that time to filter through the rock.

I didn't know that.

And this gives rise to an amazing amount of biodiversity.

By reducing pollution and widening the river-edge habitat,

the community has encouraged more birds to return

and fish stocks to improve.

And, in recent years, a very special creature has come back to the Meon.

Water vole have returned, so we've been involved

with the largest water vole reintroduction in the UK.

It's been brilliant.

After being wiped out locally by the American mink,

the park has been working with the community to release

more than 300 water voles back into the river.

So, we've enhanced the habitat,

we've been controlling the American mink,

and we've seen the water vole return in really good numbers.

And this is really good water vole habitat, here. Really good.

-That's good.

-They can get everything they need right here.

Beautiful. Beautiful.

After an absence of 20 years,

the river is also seeing the return of one of Britain's

rarest predators.

Assistant Ranger Laura Deane has set up remote cameras

to film several platforms along the river.

We have, currently, seven wildlife cameras out on the River Meon...

-Yeah.

-..and this is on one of our sites.

Oh! No!

That's extraordinary.

'They've captured the first footage of otters in the South Downs

'for more than 20 years.'

-So, the otters use the mink rafts to spraint on...

-Yes.

-..to set out their territory.

-Yes.

So, a lot of these images are of the otters sprainting

or smelling other otters that have sprainted on them.

-It's just so lovely to see them, to know that they're here.

-Yes.

And we've got breeding otter, with cubs.

Fantastic.

This year, they've returned to the Rother.

So, we've had the first recorded evidence for a long time

-on the Rother. Really exciting news.

-That's fantastic.

Because we'd expected it here on the Meon but to get it on the Rother...

-Mm.

-And that means we can start seeing them move right across

-the rivers...

-Yeah, of course.

-..to east of the Downs and hopefully see them on the Cuckmere.

Oh! Can you imagine? THEY LAUGH

The last hill.

On the other side of the brow of this hill,

St Catherine's Hill, on the western edge of the park,

the South Downs Way runs into Winchester.

Journey's end.

The ancient capital of England.

And it was here that Alfred, in the 9th century,

had Latin texts translated into English.

And through his educational reforms

he fostered the birth of the English language,

which was instrumental in tying the nation together.

The South Downs is seared into our psyche.

I love this land.

The land that I found over the last year, this land of silver rivers.

This land of winding sheep tracks across

the faces of escarpments.

This land that has a wealth of butterflies,

a wealth of wild flowers.

But, most of all, what I've learned is that this land

has been formed by many different peoples...

..and you can see their influence

through history, through the landscape,

which they clearly loved,

in every single aspect

of this extraordinary national park.

Long may it thrive.

Long may it be a place of welcome.

And long may it be

a haven for all life,

human and natural.