The Sussex Downs provide respite for Londoners, with beautiful swimming opportunities, from the reaches of the upper Ouse to the warm lake-land meanders of the Cuckmere Vale.
The best wild swimming spots, Sussex
The great winding paths of the River Cuckmere became separated from their stream in the nineteenth century, when a bypass ‘cut’ was built to stop the vale-land meadows flooding. The abandoned curves are now warm, safe lagoons, ideal for paddling, rafting and swimming. With panoramic views of the Seven Sisters cliffs and the sea, this is a stunning location to combine saltwater and freshwater swimming. How long the Cuckmere meanders will survive is now in doubt, as there are plans to let the sea flood these flatlands again and return them to their original ecology.
Wild Swimming and the Bloomsbury Group
This area was the rural heartland of the Bloomsbury Group. Above the Vale and over the Downs is Charleston Farmhouse, where Vanessa Bell lived after her separation from her husband. From here, she could walk to visit her sister, Virginia Woolf, at Rodmell, on the Ouse. The houses and surrounding countryside became the rural retreat of one of the most influential literary and artistic groups of the twentieth century, known for their love of nature and wild swimming.
E. M. Forster, schooled and brought up in nearby Tonbridge, visited more than once. Known to wild swim with Rupert Brooke in Grantchester, one of Forster’s more famous literary scenes is of Freddy, George and Mr Beebe rebelliously dipping into the Surrey ‘Sacred Lake’ in A Room with a View. Mocking the world of Edwardian manners and social codes, it symbolised the great liberation of thought and feeling that Forster and his contemporaries believed natural bathing provided.
Forster grew up swimming in the Medway, fed by the dark waters of the Ashdown Forest – home of Winnie the Pooh – between Kent and Sussex. You can still swim in the Medway, near Penshurst Place, to this day. The banks of the river slope steeply into rich, clean and weed-free water. The peaty smell and brownish hue are flavoured by the Wealds of Kent. To swim here is to be infused with an elixir of leaf litter and pine cones.
Wild swims and river boating, The Ouse
Just north of Rodmell and Charleston, upstream on the Ouse, the open fields of Barcombe Mills are a perfect place for cricket, leapfrog and other riverside games. The Ouse here is deep, with pretty grassy banks, ideal for cooling down after cartwheels or diving in for a long swim among the rushes .
The well-known Anchor Inn is nearby, just a mile upstream, at the bottom of a dead-end lane. You can hire one of its fleet of blue rowing boats or swim for over two miles through remote countryside, with the spire of Isfield church the only building in sight for the entire journey.
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