Wedding Photographer South Downs — the Chalk Escarpment, Seven Sisters and the Long Man
The South Downs National Park is England’s newest and southernmost national park — a 1,627-square-kilometre band of chalk downland running one hundred miles from Winchester in the west to Eastbourne in the east, forming the north-facing chalk escarpment above the Weald and the south-facing chalk cliffs of the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head above the English Channel. For South Downs wedding photography, the national park’s portrait landscape offers four quite distinct types within a single day: the chalk escarpment’s north-facing scarp with its panoramic Weald views from Ditchling Beacon and Firle Beacon, the chalk coastal cliffs of the Seven Sisters and Beachy Head, the chalk stream valleys of the Arun, Adur and Cuckmere and the Downs’ ancient earthwork hilltops with the Long Man of Wilmington’s chalk figure.
Seven Sisters, Beachy Head and the Chalk Coastal Cliffs
The Seven Sisters — the seven undulating chalk cliff headlands between Cuckmere Haven and Birling Gap, each formed by the successive eastward-eroding chalk valleys leaving the headland’s nose as a surviving cliff — provide the South Downs’ most dramatically beautiful coastal portrait setting: the white chalk cliffs’ 100-metre drop to the Channel below, the green turf of the cliff-top grazing and the Channel horizon provide portrait compositions of elemental English Channel cliff character that have become among the most internationally recognised Sussex landscape images. Beachy Head — the highest chalk sea cliff in England at 162 metres, with the red-and-white lighthouse visible below the cliff’s base at the Downs’ eastern terminus above Eastbourne — provides a specific landmark cliff portrait setting of maximum drama.
The Cuckmere Valley, the Long Man and Ditchling Beacon
The Cuckmere valley — the Sussex chalk stream valley cutting south from Alfriston to Cuckmere Haven’s shingle beach at the Seven Sisters’ western flank, with the river’s famous meanders visible from the valley sides and the shingle spit’s lagoons at the valley mouth — provides a specific chalk valley and coastal portrait setting combining the inland meander landscape with the cliff-and-sea at the single accessible coastal viewpoint below the Sisters. The Long Man of Wilmington — the 226-foot chalk hill figure on the escarpment face above Wilmington, the tallest representation of the human form in Britain, holding two staves and visible for thirty miles on clear days — provides a specific chalk figure portrait setting of ancient hilltop symbolic character. Ditchling Beacon’s escarpment summit above Lewes — the most celebrated South Downs northern viewpoint, looking north to the Weald, south to the sea — provides the Downs’ most accessible hilltop portrait location.