There is a famous scene in the 16th minute of the television adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ “The Snowman.” The title character offers the little boy his hand – and as if by a miracle, they both rise from a garden and float over rolling hills.

Beneath the boy’s flowing dressing gown, snow-covered fields, hedgerows, parish churches can be seen – a landscape that at first glance conjures up a timeless English idyll. Seconds later, they pass the minarets of the Brighton Pavilion. Here, one can do a rough mental triangulation and realize that these snow-covered hills are actually a real place: the South Downs Way. It was the landscape in which Raymond Briggs spent much of his life until he died in 2022.

For this and other reasons, the South Downs are a place that for me is synonymous with flying. There are the paragliders taking off from their edges. There are old airfields with their grassy runways, and passenger planes coming in to land at Gatwick. Even walking on the escarpment gives you a rare sense of height and space. You can imagine yourself suspended in the air, looking down on the English Channel on your starboard side, while on your port side is the Weald, the wooded expanse between the North and South Downs. At the crest of these hills there are few trees or buildings to obscure the view. You walk, if not exactly in the air, then at least in their company – ruffled by the breeze that blows unhindered off the sea.

A gentle gust sweeps across the hills on the day I set off east from Lewes along the South Downs Way. A buzzard soars in the blue sky; container ships sail across the silvery waters far beyond Brighton Palace Pier. It is spring and the days are getting longer: long enough for a full day’s walking. The South Downs Way is one of England’s National Trails and runs 100 miles from Winchester to the edge of Eastbourne. Over a decade I have walked much of the trail, experiencing all the seasons. I have spent a hot summer’s day climbing Ditchling Beacon and sheltered from a January shower in a wayside pub in Cocking. Walking the stages was like completing a jigsaw puzzle – and at the easternmost point of the trail a final big hole appeared. Here a path that so often flirts with the sea finally meets the sea, alongside the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head. I had wanted to walk this part for a long time – especially because there was a man on this section that I wanted to meet.

Friend of the Pilgrim

At lunchtime I pass Firle Beacon – named for the fires once lit at its summit, perhaps to warn of approaching invaders – and continue to where the escarpment opens into the Cuckmere Valley. Whenever you walk in the South Downs you can feel chalk under your feet. It’s present in the milky-white paths that glisten in the moonlight; in quarries and landslides that hide the mass of bone just beneath the grass. Chalk first formed in the late Cretaceous period (around the same time T-Rex roamed the earth) from the shells of tiny marine organisms. These landscapes have long inspired artists – and in one case the chalk itself was used to create a work of art of sorts.

The Long Man of Wilmington looms from behind a ridge. Originally carved from chalk (and in modern times rimmed with concrete), he is Britain’s tallest hill figure – at 235ft he is as tall as about 20 T-Rex – and lives on a 40-degree slope. His face is expressionless. In his hands he brandishes two sticks. He is part of a family of hill figures that inhabit the chalklands of southern England: a dozen white horses, a couple of dragons, a lion and one or two other animals – the Cerne Abbas Giant is his only human company. Apart from these facts, little is clear about him: his identity, who first carved him, indeed whether he is human at all. As I approach on foot from Lewes, he seems the perfect companion for a long-distance walker – a pilgrim brandishing his walking sticks high aloft. But he is a figure with multiple meanings. The day before my hike, I had called Charlotte Pulver, a naturopath and guide who takes people on seasonal pilgrimages to the Long Man, to learn more.

“Nobody knows the truth about the Tall Man,” she said. “But personally, I see his two staffs as a kind of gate.”

Charlotte believes the location of the figure is significant because the hill is in shadow from autumn to spring, but is illuminated by the sun from May onwards. Charlotte therefore interprets him as a gatekeeper of the seasons – he heralds the change of year and announces the return of milder weather. Charlotte’s visits coincide with the Gaelic Beltane season, which marks the beginning of summer: people come to drink botanical elixirs, listen to the sounds of flutes and drums, and make ritual sacrifices to the Long Man.

“I’ve had some experiences with the Long Man that I can’t really put into words,” she told me. “As we made offerings, amazing things appeared in the sky, like a rainbow-like light flickering around his head. It’s wonderful that there is this hill figure that we can use to honor the transition from winter to summer.”

I make my own pilgrimage around the Long Man – following a barbed wire fence wrapped in sheep’s wool, drinking a thermos of hot tea while sitting on its head. Over the years there have been other interpretations of the Long Man: that it represents St Paul, Beowulf or Constantine the Great. Excited minds once placed its origins in the Neolithic period, although more recent research has suggested it is no older than the 16th or 17th century. Whatever its age or identity, it faces skywards and somehow retains the power to draw the viewer’s thoughts to that vast sky above the South Downs – perhaps because it seems to have been sketched from a perspective in that thin air.

On the final leg of my walk, I follow the River Cuckmere south – where it makes its final meander before mixing with the salt water – and then turn east along the coastal cliffs towards Eastbourne. The White Cliffs of Dover are a sort of call sign for England – but their cousins ​​in the South Downs, the Seven Sisters, are more spectacular, and charged with the same symbolism of homecoming. Here, the subterranean limestone that walkers have walked along for so long is suddenly thrust into the air – its interior revealed like a slice of cake, with horizontal flint stripes as layers of icing.

I finish my walk at sunset on Beachy Head, where Britain’s highest chalk cliff falls into lofty oblivion. This is another place synonymous with flying: BASE jumpers regularly jump here and RAF Spitfires sometimes fly past this most famous of England’s landmarks. A sign next to a small phone box explains that the Samaritans are always there to talk, day or night.

Beachy Head also lies on a bird route between Britain and the continent. It is a place where you can measure the change of year in flight. In spring you can see brent geese on their migration; in late summer and early autumn honey buzzards, ospreys, marsh harriers and thousands of swallows fill the skies above Beachy Head. I peer cautiously over the edge and see gulls on their wings far below, circling above the breaking waves. For the briefest of moments you could imagine you were one of them: soaring in unhindered freedom above the rolling sea and rolling hills. Even higher, a red sky predicts good weather.