Everything in Portsmouth is flat and at sea level, with one glorious exception. Portsdown Hill is the long chalk ridge that rises behind the city to the north, and from its crest you get the one thing the island city cannot give you from anywhere else, the whole of it spread out below like a map. It costs nothing, it is ten minutes from the centre, and on a clear evening it is the finest free view for miles.
The best view in Portsmouth
From the top the city reads like an aerial photograph. The harbour and the dockyard sit dead ahead with the Spinnaker Tower spiking up out of the water, Portsea Island fills the middle distance, and beyond it the Solent is dotted with ships and the green line of the Isle of Wight closes the horizon. Pick your evening and the sunset over the harbour is genuinely special. “People drive up here just to watch the sun go down, and you can see why,” one walker noted, and the laybys along the top fill up on a fine night for exactly that reason.
A line of Victorian forts
The hill is crowned by a chain of great Victorian forts, built in the 1860s on the orders of Lord Palmerston to guard the dockyard from an attack by land that never came, which earned them the nickname Palmerston’s Follies. Fort Widley, Fort Southwick and Fort Purbrook march along the ridge, and at the western end sits Fort Nelson, now the Royal Armouries’ artillery museum and free to visit, its ramparts and tunnels a proper day out in their own right. Even from the roadside the forts give the walk a sense of history most viewpoints lack.
Walking and cycling the ridge
The top of the hill is laced with paths, so it is as much a place to stretch the legs as to park and look. You can walk the ridge between the forts with the view at your shoulder the whole way, and it links into longer routes down towards the harbour and the countryside behind. It is open, breezy and dog-friendly, and it makes a bracing change from the seafront for a weekend walk when you fancy looking down on the sea rather than along it.
When to go, and getting there
The hill runs along Portsdown Hill Road, with several free viewpoint laybys strung along the top and a couple of pubs, the Churchillian among them, that trade almost entirely on the panorama from their windows. Early evening is the prize for the sunset, but a bright, clear winter day gives the sharpest view of all. It is a short drive or a steady uphill bus ride from the city, and once you are up there the looking is free. Pair it with a round of free things to do in Portsmouth and you have a day that barely touches your wallet.
