Planting Route
We will honour the 70th year of the Queen’s reign by making the escarpment a much richer place for wildlife, and a beautiful and engaging place for people. We will encourage sponsorship of trees, seating and waymarkers; work with schools and other groups to make the escarpment a place of active enjoyment and connection with nature; encourage and enable people to play a personal part in looking after it.
Butts Brow to Babylon Down
In this stretch the Avenue runs along the top of the escarpment from the Butts Brow car park and then dips down to the Foxholes Clearing.
We have not yet settled on a final track for the avenue in this area, principally because we have yet to identify a group who would like to be involved in looking after it.
We hope that schools and other local groups may be able to get involved, in which case either of the two un-named red areas towards the top of the map – one a clearing and the other a wood – may be suitable.
The Babylon Woods group, an active local group including Ratton School, is emerging around the clearance work that has been done next to Old Mansion Close.
If this is the part of the Avenue where you would like to plant, opt for Butts Brow to Babylon Down as your preferred location:
Careful placement of a few shrubs and small trees will be possible. Please subscribe for a Sapling (not a Whip, which is too small for an untended area, or a Tree, which requires more maintenance than can be given here). We will contact you to discuss what and where.
If you would like to support the work at Old Mansion Close, a simple donation will be best. There is not yet a planting plan, and a lot of the planting needed has anyway already been done by Treebourne. The group will, however, need to buy kit for maintaining tracks and benches for sitting on, and Ratton School will need to make a space suitable for their pupils.
Foxholes Clearing
Foxholes Clearing is a 200 metre long, 40 metre wide strip of hillside between and beside two ancient tracks leading up the escarpment from Hill Road.
The northern track comes down off the top of the escarpment with the species-rich woodlands of The Earl of Willingdon's shooting estate to its left and a young yew wood to its right. Apart from a bit of looking after, these woods will be left well alone. The clearing is sheltered; the views from it are lovely. It is a perfect place for people to make a place for themselves and for wildlife: thick scrubby edges to the woods, grass between.
At the moment, though, it is just a strip of brambles and tree stumps, with a few young yew trees. It will take the next 20 years to make it the place it could be.
The key to a space like this is human maintenance, regularly applied in manageable amounts. We have not yet secured a source of such maintenance, though we have high hopes of finding one.
If this is the part of the Avenue where you would like to plant, opt for Foxholes Clearing as your preferred location: A simple donation will be best. There is not yet a planting plan, and the needs of whoever takes on looking after this space have yet to be established.
We will keep trying to find such a group, and reserve your funds for them, but will deploy them elsewhere if we have to give up.
Hill Road and Priory Heights
For this stretch of the Avenue we have a well-worked-up planting plan.
Whatever our plans, what actually gets planted here will depend on what you choose to subscribe for, and on the discussions that we have over the next four months.
For detailed planting plans, please follow the links below:
Warm Orchard (WO) 
– One of the few south-facing slopes on the escarpment, which could become a place for people to sit out in the summer, a community orchard growing fruits that like some extra heat – figs (East Sussex used to be famous for its fig gardens), mulberries, cherries and others.
Cold Orchard (CO) – East-facing slopes that will suit apples, pears, cherries and soft fruit.
High Nuttery (HN) – A deep valley that grew strong ash trees, and will make an excellent place to grow nuts: hazels, walnuts, chestnuts, pecans.
Hill Road (HR) – The space between the avenue and Hill Road. We suggest that this should be planted with a diversity of shrubs chosen for their wildlife value and to avoid overshadowing gardens, with a few small trees near the Avenue.
Den Hill (DH) – As Hill Road but with a large additional space (HR1) which might be replanted or not, as funds allow.
Tall Avenue (TA – Where the track of the Avenue runs at the bottom of the slope some way behind the houses, an excellent place to plant a variety of tall trees to create a forest environment.
If this is the part of the Avenue where you would like to plant, opt for Priory Heights as your preferred location:
Most of the native trees and shrubs will be planted as Whips, but if you sponsor them as a Sapling we will give them pride of place.
All the fruit trees and bushes will be planted as Saplings, but we could upgrade some of the ones that are next to the track and easy to water to Trees.
We have made space for a few Trees, notably apples and hawthorn with mistletoe growing on them.
There is room for four good benches.
We would like to put waymarkers where the Avenue leaves Foxholes Clearing, above the junction of Priory Heights and Burrow Down, and at the entrance to Tall Avenue.
A simple donation will always be welcome. We would like to raise enough funds to improve the quality of the Avenue between the entrance at the southern end of Priory Heights and the beginning of Tall Avenue, making the Avenue easily and safely accessible in all weathers. We expect this to cost about £20,000.
Pashley Down
Pashley Down Infant School, who already have a fine environmental reputation, are hoping to combine with Motcombe School, Ocklynge School and perhaps others to establish a natural history base in the clearing above them on the escarpment, to help look after it, and to improve (over time) the scrub and woodland that surrounds it. Plans are not yet in draft.
There is also potential to improve the woodland immediately to the east of Pashley Down’s patch, along Peppercombe Road and Longland Road. There is not at present a group that wants to take this on.
If this is the part of the Avenue where you would like to plant, opt for Pashley Down as your preferred location: A simple donation will be best. There is not yet a planting plan.
Cherry Garden Road
The woodland in this part of the Avenue is largely mature sycamore with some beech, elm and cherry. Resorted to by local children for woodland adventure, and a great pleasure to walk through on a sunny day.
There's some need for light forestry work, looking after the trees that are there, and a few spaces where a bit of diversity could be introduced.
The track of the avenue here is mostly in good condition, either forestry tracks or established woodland walks, with some scope for minor improvements. At the southern end it would help make the path more accessible if the track bent up the hill to meet the A259 at the Youth Hostel rather than relying on a degraded set of steps.
If this is the part of the Avenue where you would like to plant, opt for Cherry Garden Road as your preferred location: There will be room for a very few Saplings. If you opt for one or more of these we will contact you to discuss what and where. There will be room for a bench or two, and at least one waymarker.
A simple donation will always be welcome. We would like to raise enough funds to reroute the current path to remove the need for steps to access the A259 crossing. Exactly how and where this is done will take some working out, and may well be affected by Black Robin Farm plans as they develop. We would not be surprised to find that this would cost us £50,000.
Royal Eastbourne Golf Club
For this stretch of the Avenue we have a well-worked-up planting plan, and will be basing conversations around it at The Royal Eastbourne Gold Club.
Whatever our plans, what actually gets planted here will depend on what you choose to subscribe for, and on the discussions that we have over the next four months.
For detailed planting plans, please follow the links below:
REGC Boundary (RB) – The Royal Eastbourne Golf Club maintains its boundary well, with flower-rich grasslands bordering scrub and some decorative trees. We aim to enhance it with additional shrubs and decorative small trees so that its beauty adds to the enjoyment of golfers, walkers and onlookers.
REGC Avenue (RA) – On the other side of the avenue, we aim to create a 30 metre deep wood edge – varied scrub grading into small trees and then into high forest – with a lot of beauty.
REGC Escarpment (RE) – The escarpment above the golf course can be seen from a long way across town. We would like to paint with greys and light greens and dark greens, flowers in spring and colour in autumn too, so that it adds to the beauty of the town and to the motivation of people to come up it and into the downlands beyond.
In the middle of this crescent of escarpment, RE5, is a space that the Coastal Schools Partnership have staked a claim to as a place for pupils to be immersed in and learn about nature.
If this is the part of the Avenue where you would like to plant, opt for Royal Eastbourne Golf Course as your preferred location: Most of the native trees and shrubs will be planted as Whips, but if you sponsor them as a Sapling we will give them pride of place. Many of the unusual trees and bushes will be planted as Saplings, but we could upgrade some of the ones that are next to the track and easy to water to Trees
We have made space for a good number of Trees, on either side of the Avenue.
There is room for four good benches.
We would like to put waymarkers at either end of this section.
A simple donation will always be welcome. We would like to raise enough funds to improve the quality of the Avenue along the southern half of this section, making the Avenue easily and safely accessible in all weathers. We expect this to cost about £50,000.
Moira House
At the end of the Royal Golf Club section the avenue turns uphill, and traverses a mixed woodland planted after the 1987 storm. It then turns uphill again, towards Warren Hill and then on to Black Robin Farm.
This is, for the moment, the least well defined part of the Avenue, as we need to work it in with proposals for active-travel links between the Black Robin Farm levelling-up scheme and the town. These have not yet emerged.
Whatever happens, the slope above Moira House is bound to be one of the main routes from town to Black Robin.
We envisage planting in three areas:
ME1 and ME2: reinforcing and decorating the edges of existing woodland with shrubs and small flowering trees. ME3: renovating an existing ash woodland, creating a large clearing in it – wonderful for wildlife and people alike – and thick plantings of shrubs and high trees.
For more detail on our planting plans go to EJGC Moira House .
If this is the part of the Avenue where you would like to plant, opt for Moira House as your preferred location: Most of the native trees and shrubs will be planted as Whips, but if you sponsor them as a Sapling we will give them pride of place. Many of the unusual trees and bushes will be planted as Saplings, but we could upgrade some of the ones that are next to the track and easy to water to Trees
We have made space for a few Trees, in ME1 and on the corners of ME3.
There is room for two good benches in the clearing, and one to the north west of the wood where there is a fine view over town. We would like to put waymarkers next to the renovated wood and where the Avenue enters the 1987 plantation.
A simple donation will always be welcome. We would like to raise enough funds to do some path improvements, and to consider contributing to the renovation of chalk grassland in this area – a matter of spending money on mowing and grazing over a decade or so.
Black Robin Farm
The Levelling-Up development at Black Robin Farm will demand active travel routes to town and to the seafront.
The Eden Project’s ambitions in Eastbourne, to take flight in a feasibility study shortly, are likely to include this landscape. Therefore, while we are sure that there will be an Avenue in this section – Black Robin deserves something special, a welcoming gateway to Eastbourne – we don’t yet know what the route or style will be.
There's a limit, imposed by the wind, on what we can plant up there, but much beauty can be found in small trees and shrubs.
This would also be an obvious place to put sculpture in the landscape - within walking range of Black Robin, in places with superb views over the town and the sea beyond.
We are talking to the Meads junior schools, led by St Andrew’s, about their having a space for their pupils in this part of the escarpment.
If this is the part of the Avenue where you would like to plant, opt for Black Robin Farm as your preferred location:
We don’t yet know if we will have space to plant Whips.
We are very likely to be planting Saplings, but we do not know what or where.
There will probably be space for a few Trees.
There will certainly be room for benches, but we do not know how many or where.
There will certainly be room for waymarkers, but we don’t know what or where.
A simple donation will always be welcome. If you opt to sponsor something specific, this is on the understanding that while we will do our best to fulfil your wishes we may in the end have to invest your donation in other ways.