South Down National Park, England

        

• England's Newest National Park The South Downs are a line of rolling hills that run roughly parallel to England’s southeast coast and create a landscape of open heath and chalk grasslands, 400-year-old oak woods, and dramatic coastline—highlighted by the towering cliffs of Seven Sisters and Beachy Head. South Downs is less than an hour from London and, though England’s newest national park, stunningly popular. The National Park Authority estimates 39 million visitors come to the park each year—nearly triple the number to the next most visited national park.

• White Chalk The bones of South Downs are made of chalk limestone, the soft rock formed by the fossilized skeletons of sea creatures that inhabited an ancient ocean here nearly 100 million years ago. In some places this chalk contains visible remains of ammonites, sea urchins, sponges, and other ancient creatures. The brilliant white rock is most obvious in the exposed cliffs of the Seven Sisters, between Cuckmere Haven and Birling Gap. The cliffs here are worn away by 10 inches (25 to 30 centimeters) each year by the action of the ocean.

• Wave-Cut Platform When the tide is out, a trip to the wave-cut platform at the foot of the towering cliffs gives visitors a glimpse of living and ancient creatures. Fossils such as giant ammonites can be found here, and the area is alive with modern marine animals. Limpets and mussels, whelks, sea anemones, and shrimp can be found on the rocks and in pools. Visitors can also see algae, seaweed, and even kelp forests—though these lie at the platform’s oceanside edge and emerge only at the year’s lowest spring tides.

• Rare Landscape Chalk downland, the park’s iconic landscape of rolling hills covered with grass, scrub, and heather, may seem commonplace here but is globally rare. Even in South Downs chalk grassland exists over only 3 percent of its original area thanks to intrusions of invasive scrub and the encroachment of modern farming and development.

• Great Diversity Today the grasslands are home to species in amazing variety—up to 40 different plants may live in a single square meter. This diversity is sustained by intense competition for nutrients in the thin, well-drained soils overlying the chalk below. The many plants and flowers help to sustain an animal ecosystem that includes insects, rare butterflies, snails, hares, and birds.