Bognor Regis to Littlehampton
Last month, I was visiting family in Sussex with my friend Hannah and we decided to do a coastal walk on my birthday, which was a lovely treat. It was the first one of these walks that I’ve done in ‘inclement weather’. It was warm but damp, a bit rainy, very windy and there was a lot of spray coming off the sea too. But we were walking out of the wind so our backs were the wettest and it was still nice to be beside the sea. When I was a student in Brighton I used to love to go down to the beach when it was stormy and stand on the end of the big concrete groynes and feel the spray on my face.
This walk was also exciting because it was joining up with another one I had done for the first time, which was fun! This walk joins up with Littlehampton to Worthing, which I walked with my Aunt and Uncle in July last year.
We started out in Bognor Regis, which I had never visited, despite living in Brighton for four years and visiting family in Sussex all my life. According to Christopher Goddard’s guide to walking the English coast, Bognor is named after a female Saxon chieftain called Bucga and became a seaside destination in the 18th Century. Now it is a fairly typical UK seaside town, which wasn’t too busy on a grey weekday in May. We stopped for a quick play in the arcades before setting off on our walk because, have you even been to the seaside if you haven’t fed 2ps into a machine?
As we set off on our slightly soggy coastal walk, we passed the large Butlins holiday park on the edge of the town and soon were walking through some very upmarket villages on the outskirts of the town. The path follows the promenade for a while, sometimes dropping onto the shingle in places, which made for tough walking. But it was very flat compared to other recent walks on the Yorkshire and Devon coasts.
I was impressed by this huge breakwater at Elmer, clearly built to try and stop the erosion of the unstable coast here. It made me wonder how effective it has been and also what the wider impacts of building such big, heavy structures to manage these natural processes.
One of my favourite parts of this stretch of coast was the stretch around Arthington and Climping Gap. Here the coast is pretty undeveloped and farmland came right up to the edge of what looked like a pretty unstable cliff or berm, I’m not actually sure.
There were also some beautiful sand dunes as we approached Littlehampton and the mouth of the River Arun, which were fenced off to protect the wildlife and vegetation within the dune ecosystem. According to the information board, the dunes are home to over 50 species of insects and the rare and endangered Sand Lizard.
Depending on the shape of the coastline, and the visibility, sometimes it is possible to see the destination for the whole of a walk. That wasn’t quite possible on this one, but we could see Littlehampton from quite a way off and we could also see the channel markers that show the way into the River Arun. I always find this motivates me and I can often find that I speed up on the last stretch of a walk when the end is literally in sight.
It was a joy to share my birthday and this walk with my lovely friend Hannah. We’d made the trip to Sussex to visit the rewilding project at Knepp, which was just wonderful. We saw and heard so much wonderful wildlife, it felt like a truly magical place. Here is a picture of a stork!
As I mentioned earlier, it was fun to join up two walks for the first time, as you can see on the screen grabs of Strava maps below. The total stretch is about 16 miles, which would have been too much for me to do in one go. And I’m sure I’ll be back in Sussex soon to see family and hopefully walk a little more of the coast.
