Do I need a link to my sitemap?

[EcommerceSite]

I have a very large sitemap. I submit  it to both Google and Bing, but do I need a link to it? If someone went there it would probably lock their browser. Is there any danger of not having a link if I submit it to Google and Bing?

[SEOAndy]

two limits to be aware of here

1. Google won't index a sitemap larger than 50mb
2. Google won't index a sitemap of more than 50K urls

There is no need to link in html to your sitemap if you are submitting it by webmaster tools, though a poke can be helpful from robots.txt which would look something like :

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

and go under your various statements (should be the last thing)

Hope this helps

[TomRayner]

To follow up on Andy's point about size - you can submit multiple XML sitemaps to webmaster tools.  When I've used multiple ones before for a large ecommerce site, I believed it helped with the indexing.