Brighton, the Downs and the cliffs at Birling Gap

Almost every Brighton itinerary starts in Brighton. That is a mistake if the weather is doing anything interesting, because the view from Devil’s Dyke is the thing most affected by haze and it is at its best before eleven.

Doing the high ground first also means arriving in the city at lunchtime rather than mid-morning, which is when Brighton is at its most enjoyable anyway. The escarpment is twenty minutes above the city and the two feel like different counties.

From the outside it looks like a Mughal palace that has been dropped into a Regency seaside town. Inside it is entirely Chinese, in a way that has to be seen rather than described, and the kitchen with its cast-iron palm trees is the room people talk about afterwards.

An hour and a quarter does it. It is the single best building on the south coast and it takes almost nobody more than that, which makes it easy to fit into a day that has a lot of driving in it.

Brighton has a serious shortage of parking and a seafront with restrictions along most of its length. Anyone who has driven themselves there on an August Saturday knows what the first hour of the day looks like.

Being set down at the Pavilion and collected two hours later on a side street off the front removes all of that. It is the least glamorous argument for a chauffeur on this page and it is the one guests mention most often.

People use the two names interchangeably and they are different places three miles apart. The Cuckmere is the meandering river mouth with the water meadows, photographed from the hill above at Exceat. The Seven Sisters are the chalk cliffs east of it, best seen from the beach at Birling Gap.

Both are worth stopping at and they take an hour between them. Knowing which one you want to photograph before you arrive saves a fair amount of walking in the wrong direction.

The chalk here is eroding at a genuine rate, several feet in some years, and the cliff edge moves. The National Trust fences the path back as it goes, and a handful of visitors climb over the fence every summer to stand closer to the drop.

Do not. The overhang is invisible from above and the chalk fails without warning. The view from behind the fence is the same view, and the beach at Birling Gap gives you the better photograph in any case.

There is an alternative day that runs west instead of east: Arundel Castle and its cathedral, then Chichester and the harbour, with Goodwood on the way back. It is a gentler, greener day with more building and less cliff.

It cannot be combined with the eastern loop, because the two ends are forty miles apart with Brighton in the middle. Where a party has two days in Sussex, the eastern day and the western day together cover the county properly.

Glyndebourne sits at Glynde, ten minutes from Alfriston, which means a summer version of this day can end at the opera rather than back in London. The Downs in the morning, Brighton at lunchtime, the cliffs in the afternoon and a performance at five.

It makes for a fourteen-hour day and it is one of the better ways to spend one. The picnic travels in the boot from London and comes out on the lawn, and the car takes you home somewhere around midnight.