The Wansdyke & District Forums

A public service announcement, because it comes up every time a visitor posts a photograph. Most of our white horses are NOT ancient. We have a dozen or so hill figures in this county and only one, the Uffington horse just over the border, is genuinely prehistoric, Bronze or Iron Age, and it does not even look like a horse; it looks more like a dragon or a cat stretching. The Wiltshire horses, Cherhill, Westbury, Alton Barnes, Marlborough, Hackpen, are eighteenth and nineteenth century, cut by local gentry and enthusiasts in a great fashion for it. Westbury may sit on the site of an older one. The rest are Georgian and Victorian leisure: handsome, but not Neolithic. Please stop telling people they are five thousand years old.

https://wiltshirewhitehorses.org.uk/map.html

All true, Trevor, and yet. The fashion for cutting them in the 1700s did not come from nowhere. People cut new horses because the chalk wanted a horse on it, because there was Uffington up the way being scoured every seven years by the whole community in a great fair, time out of mind. The Georgians were not inventing a thing; they were answering an old call in a new accent. A Victorian horse on an ancient hill is still part of something very long. The chalk remembers what it likes to wear.

I will allow you the poetry, Annie, since you allow me the dates. The scouring fairs are the genuinely old and interesting thing, you are quite right; Uffington was scoured within living memory and there are wonderful accounts of the cheese-rolling and the games. The figure is only kept alive by the community that clears the grass off it. Stop scouring and the hill takes it back in twenty years. So perhaps we agree: the horses last exactly as long as people care to keep them white, and not one day longer.

this is a great thread. so the horse only stays a horse because people keep weeding it? i love that. left alone the hill just... swallows it. theres something a bit haunting in that, all these horses only here because somebody keeps showing up to scrub them white.