These poems tell the story of David May's ten-day solo walk along the one hundred mile South Downs Way and the places, the landscape and most of all the people he met on his journey across the ancient undulating chalk downland - the quintessential Southern England landscape - between his Hampshire home in Winchester to the East Sussex coastal resort of Eastbourne, over the hot summer of 2025.

Below the mediaeval cathedral
Lies a magical chalk stream
Flowing due east beneath
The longest nave in England
That floods the crypt in wintertime -
This is the ancient place
From whence my journey must begin
To walk one hundred miles
Towards the rising sun
Along the high chalk ridge
Where our ancestors walked before
On the South Downs Way.