South Downs on a budget: a youth hostel stay for great walks and pretty villages

In the first of a new series on UK hostels, our writer stays in a YHA pod and hikes a glorious corner of the downs

There’s something eminently pleasing about jumping out at a tiny railway station in the middle of nowhere and heading off into the blue on a scorching summer day.

Close to the River Ouse, in a dip in the South Downs, Southease station appears to serve nowhere at all. Only the spires of churches across the valley give away the presence of two East Sussex villages: Southease and Rodmell – the latter home for many years to Virginia Woolf, who lived at Monk’s House, now owned by the National Trust. Turning in the other direction, a couple of friends and I set out along a pot-holed lane and a few hundred metres later were at the South Downs hostel.