RICHARD WILLIAMSON Country Walk...Amberley Mount

Grass verge parking along South Downs Way in High Titten Lane or from Amberley railway station on the Chichester to London line with frequent trains. If by car, follow SDW signs uphill, eastwards, onto Amberley Mount. If by train, cross main road next to rail onto Arun bank past cafe.

View to west is Shoulder of Mutton Hill, where we walked last week. First world war poet Edward Thomas lived there. Northwest is Blackdown, 14 miles away, where lived Alfred Lord Tennyson.

North at 22 miles is Guildford on the North Downs. Amberley Wildbrooks with its 360 species of wild flowers lies a mile below and rare birds. Two miles west are the woods of Bignor and Westburton hills where novelist John Galsworthy rode his horse every morning.

Leave SDW on blue arrow, south, descending down a flinty/chalky pathway into the silence of Burgh Bottom where just on the right you will see the remains of an ancient dewpond that watered the sheep in centuries past.

The slopes are grazed and managed for downland turf with early purple and spotted orchids, also bee and fragrant orchids. About 20 species of butterflies live here including three of the blues.

Almost a time-warp back to another age - these valleys were carved ten to 18 thousand years ago by the Ice Ages.

You climb back up side of hill southeast to a crossways on the Burgh, taking a right turn southwest on maroon arrow. Skylarks should be singing high overhead.

Canadian troops trained here before D-Day but the barn called Canada is an older name given to many lonely places in Sussex by a much-earlier age.

This minor road descends slowly down Camp Hill, crossing above the railway, and into North Stoke hamlet. Church at end of road west, has Norman nave, early English chancel, and with 14th-century stained glass, and many carved corbels of animal heads and foliage. Manor Farm rebuilt 1819, flint and brick.

The road now wanders north along the swampy margins of the meadows following the rail above you. If by car, you have now to cross the main road past the cafe, or cross the Arun by Houghton Bridge and join the west bank when a footbridge will take you back over the Arun when you will walk east to join SDW again.

This will take you back over the railway yet again and onto the main road. Follow this south for 200 yards then left up High Titten back to your car.

Mine was an old Alvis wanting to join the others in the Chalkpits Industrial Museum next to the railway station, where it could have hobnobbed with a Lancaster bomber cockpit, an ancient printing press, a huge stationary engine, narrow-gauge trains and engines, 1920s Southdown buses, or just the nature reserve with primroses, twayblade orchids and blackcap warblers.

** See the April 26 issue of the Observer to view a map of this walk.