Walking in the air: Snowman creator Raymond Briggs’s favourite Sussex paths

So it’s fitting that the first exhibition of his life and work since his death in 2022 is being held not in a London gallery but at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, just a couple of miles from his house in the village of Westmeston.

Photographs of him at the desk show the view he called “a great privilege”, stretching north across the Sussex Weald to the faint haze of Ashdown Forest in the distance.

There’s something slightly miraculous about this broad swathe of countryside sandwiched between the built-up coastal strip and the belt of commuter towns – Burgess Hill, Haywards Heath and Crawley that lie to the north of Briggs’ corner of the national park.

If I have more time, I’ll walk the three miles from Ditchling to East Chiltington, following the route of the old Roman road – the Greensand Way – that once ran from Barcombe Mills, near Lewes, to Pulborough in West Sussex.

My favourite is the Jolly Sportsman in East Chiltington – the kind of pub you’d never find if you didn’t know it was there, with a sunlit, flower-filled garden and elegant, candlelit dining rooms.

Eat The Nutmeg Tree in Ditchling serves excellent lunches, coffee and cake in its pretty walled garden and traditional tearoom, while the Half Moon in Plumpton offers small plates – welsh rarebit, mushrooms on toast – alongside pub classics.