Tourism, Leisure and Sport
In 1923 the Society of Sussex Downsmen (now the South Downs Society) was formed with the aim of protecting the area's unique landscape.
The South Downs is a popular area for ramblers with a network of over 2,000 miles (3,200 km) of well-managed, well-signed and easily accessible trails. The principal bridleway, and longest of them, is the South Downs Way. The Monarch's Way, having originated at Worcester, crosses the South Downs and ends at Shoreham-by-Sea.
Sports undertaken on the Downs include paragliding, mountain-biking, horse riding and walking. The popular Beachy Head Marathon (formerly Seven Sisters Marathon), a hilly cross-country marathon, takes place each autumn on the eastern Downs, starting and finishing in Eastbourne.
Read more about this topic: South Downs
Famous quotes containing the words leisure and/or sport:
“A broad margin of leisure is as beautiful in a man’s life as in a book. Haste makes waste, no less in life than in housekeeping. Keep the time, observe the hours of the universe, not of the cars. What are threescore years and ten hurriedly and coarsely lived to moments of divine leisure in which your life is coincident with the life of the universe?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
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—George Orwell (1903–1950)