All The Pretty Horses, and Two Buck Naked Giants: England’s Chalk Hill Carvings
Somewhere, deep in the pastures of the human soul, there are horses, galloping. The quote is argued over. Some people say it came from Churchill. But then again, especially in England, someone will almost always say that anything vaguely inspiring came from Churchill. This one feels especially unlikely to me. I’m in the camp that votes for T.E. Lawrence. But it doesn’t really matter, because no matter who said it, there seems to be some deep truth in it. At least as far as our ancient ancestors are concerned, at least in England, where the country’s most extraordinary hill carving, the Uffington Horse, gallops across a hill on the border between Oxfordshire and Wiltshire.
And he’s only the beginning. Somewhere deep in the English soul there seems to be a compulsion to carve enormous horses into the sides of chalk hills. There are no less than twenty-four of them, sixteen still clearly visible. Oh, and two giants. Both guys. Both without any clothes on. Men. Visiting these geoglyphs, as they are technically known, walking to them, just plain staring at them, is one of the strangest, and nicest, ways to literally reach out and touch the nation’s history.
Of the all the British horse carvings, the most ancient, and the most weird, and the most, just generally glorious and strange is the Uffington White Horse. He is one of those things, for lack of a better term, that gives you an immediate sense of both the strangeness and continuity of human history. To look at him – and I am sure it is a him, why, I don’t know, but I am – is to feel, just for a second, the layering of time – the sense that the deep past can still be glimpsed, galloping across the present.
Dated at almost 3,000 years old, and carved almost three feet deep into the undulations of a hillside above a very odd valley called The Manger, the Uffington Horse is a fluid arrangement of abstract lines. It’s not until you get quite far away, or, these days, up in the sky, that he looks like a horse at all. When you do, though, he has a powerful sense of motion, and, well, ‘horse-ness’. The valley he gallops above is something of geological oddity, a dry basin with springs at its base.
To one side of the horse is a low, round mound called Dragon Hill. Some 650 feet above him is a Bronze Age hill fort called Uffington Castle, while nearby is a late Stone Aged chambered tomb called Waylands Smithy. Due to its placement, the horse cannot be easily seen from a long way away. It therefore probably wasn’t a territorial marker. So, what was it? What is it? No small part of its power comes from the fact that we don’t really have answers to those questions.
Celtic coins dating from around 150 BC feature an image the looks very like the Uffington Horse, while across Scandinavia, carvings of similar stylized horses from around the same dates have been found, leading archeologists to wonder if they are a universal symbol of some kind of lost religion, possibly associated with the sun. The idea that the sun was pulled into , and across, and down the sky by mighty horses, or an almighty horse, was not uncommon across the ancient world.
Language analysis suggests that this connection between horse and sun, and light and dark, and thus the cycle of both time and life originates and spreads at around the same time horses were first brought into domestic use. One theory suggests that the Uffington Horse gallops across the shoulder of the hill because there he is closest to the sky. In midwinter, when the English sun is very low, it hits the horse’s head on rising then rolls along his back reaching his tail at sunset, when he draws it down into the underworld, entering through the nearby chambered tomb where he gallops through the night before returning with the sun the next morning.
Another legend says that King Arthur is buried near by, and that when he awakens to save England from peril, the Uffington Horse will also awaken, and dance on Dragon Hill, where, of course, England’s patron Saint, St George slew his dragon…
Over the county line, not very far away to the south west in Wiltshire, the Westbury Horse was probably originally almost as ancient. He is also just below an Iron Age fort, this one called Bratton Down. Unfortunately, in 1778, someone had the brilliant idea of ‘restoring’ him, so we no longer know what the original looked like. Evidence suggests that he was facing in the other direction, and may have originally been carved, or at least re-carved to commemorate King Alfred The Great’s ( he of the cakes, see the entry on Vikings) victory over the Danes in 878 at the battle of Edington, or Ethandun, which was fought at Bratton Camp.
Another theory suggests that the Westbury Horse was in fact carved to celebrate the landing in Britain of Hengist and Horsa, ( the name certainly fits!). Warrior chieftain brothers from Jutland, Hengist and Horsa led an army of Angles and Saxons and Jutes, a coalition which sounds suspiciously like a geometry equation, to Britain sometime around 450AD. Their mission was generally to give the Picts a good thumping, and in the process become the Anglo-Saxons. Of course, both origin stories may be true, since Alfred, despite being a lousy baker, was a notable Saxon King, and monuments and symbols were, and are, frequently reappropriated and regenerated.
Whatever the truth of the Westbury horse’s origins, by the 18th century White Horses had become kind of an Anglo Saxon Thing. For the next hundred and fifty years or so, the country went nuts for them. And in no small way. They’re big. The Westbury Horse seen today is 180 feet tall and a 170 feet wide. He stands proudly looking out over Wiltshire, which is White Horse ground zero. Although legend has it that you must not look for him at midnight. Because as the Bratton church begins to strike twelve, he leaves his hill and comes down to nearby Bridewell Springs to drink.
Twenty miles northeast of the Westbury Horse, the Cherwell Horse, who is also known as the Oldbury Horse, trots across a hill below yet another set of ancient earthworks called Oldbury Castle. He was carved in 1780. Next up is The Pershute White Horse. Carved in 1804, he is quite petite at a mere 62 by 47 feet. His size may be explained by the fact that he was school project – a possibly innovative way of keeping kids from getting unruly or bored between lessons. Need extra credit? Forget running laps or the dreaded Science Fair – go carve a sixty foot high horse in the nearest available hill.
Farther west in Dorset, the Osmington, or Owld White Horse was carved four years later in 1808 in honor of George III (yes, That One) who, when he wasn’t losing the American Revolution or talking to oak trees in Windsor Great Park, quite liked to visit nearby Weymouth. At a mere 260 feet high, The Osmington White Horse is the only one with a rider, presumably King George, and one of only four of the White Horses that face right. Most prefer to look left.
Back in Wiltshire, 1812 was marked by the carving of the Alton Barnes White Horse by someone called John ‘The Painter’ Thorne. Having laid out his design at 166 feet high and 160 feet wide, which sounds odd but apparently works for proportion at a distance, John skipped town with his twenty pound fee and left everyone else to do the actual work.
Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838 inspired two White Horses. The Hackpen White Horse, aka, the Broadhinton or Winterbourne White Horse in Wiltshire and, in Sussex, The Litlington White Horse. After that, the craze seems to have died down for about a century, until the White Horse on Pewsey Downs near Avebury was carved to celebrate the coronation of George VI in 1937.
Avebury is ancient and mysterious place in its own right, and legend has it that the Pewsey White Horse is yet another that is carved over a much older one that fell into disrepair and was lost because the local farmer who owned the land it was on got fed up with the mysterious but raucous festivities celebrated around it on midsummer’s eve. If so, it wouldn’t be the only one lost. There’s no way of knowing how many White Horses there may once have been. Recently, a crop plane flying over Cambridgeshire to take pictures of drainage dykes spotted an outline in the fields that looks as if it may be yet another horse galloping across ancient, Britain that has decided it’s time again to reveal itself.
Yes, you say that’s all very well – but what about those naked giants? Well, there are two of them, and they are both seriously impressive. The most, well, up front, is in Cerne Abbas in Dorset, not too far from Mad King George on his 260 foot high White Horse. The Cerne Abbas Giant is a lot older though, or at least bits of him are, and far more mysterious. At roughly 2,000 years old, at least the bits that haven’t been ‘revised’, he’s still a whippersnapper compared to the Uffington Horse god.
Whether he is a Celtic fertility symbol, as his anatomy surely suggests, or a god, or just a really big angry, naked guy with a club, we don’t know. At 180 feet tall, he is certainly a force to be reckoned with. Geophysical imaging suggests that he wasn’t always quite as naked. It looks as though he might once have had a cloak of some kind draped over his outstretched arm, which might suggest that he is a sort of Roman Hercules/Native British fertility god hybrid. Uphill from him is a Bronze Age round earthwork called a ‘barrow’ dating from 2000 BC, and another set of earthworks dating from around 800BC called The Trendle. Celebrations are still held there, as they probably have been for some 3 or 4,000 years, every May Day at dawn.
The second giant, who lives over in Sussex, some six miles inland from Eastbourne, is also naked, although not as graphically. If anything he is more mysterious. Standing at 235 feet high, The Wilmington Long Man is the largest depiction of a human being in Europe, and his past is hotly debated. He was ‘renovated’ to look the way he does now sometime between 1710 and 1766. Evidence, however, suggests that the original figure wore a helmet, leading some to speculate that he was originally a Roman god, which could date him anywhere between AD 43 when the Romans arrived, and AD410, when they left. Other legends say he was created by monks from a local priory sometime between the 11th and 15th centuries. Why a bunch of celibate men would have gone around etching huge naked guys into hillsides – and what they were thinking when they did, if they did, is a whole other question… Whenever he was made, we do know that The Wilmington Long Man was originally different than he is now. Apart from his helmet, we can tell from the way he is carved that originally he could only be seen when the sun was at exactly the right angle. Otherwise, he hid in the hill, waiting to reveal himself. So to speak.
The chalk figures, horse and human, god, king, and mortal, are all mysterious and weirdly powerful in their own way. Each of them suggests a deep human impulse to carve history into the landscape, to, literally, invest the country with its past. And then, to maintain that past and whatever history it symbolizes, even if the details of it have been forgotten.
All chalk carvings must be renewed and maintained, or else they will grow over, be lost to weeds and grass and vanish like the names and motives of those who carved them. In fact, during World War II, many of them were deliberately covered, especially the White Horses at Cherwell and Uffington, so the Luftwaffe could not use them as navigational aids during bombing missions.
Horses, and other symbols, including a giant kiwi are still being carved into English hills. The very fact that the oldest of them, sixteen white horses and two mysterious naked giants, are still visible is testament to humanity’s impulse to preserve history, even when no one is quite sure exactly what it means. Every year, people from around the world come to Uffington to donate their time and energy to climbing the hill, and plucking encroaching grass, and pounding chalk back into the horse’s outline. The fact that they do has become a meaning within itself, a testament to our need for him to gallop along his hillside, pulling the sun down an unbroken chain of some 150 generations of human effort to preserve history.
LOGISTICS: For When you can get there (It’s coming!) As usual, this site is not monetized. The links and recommendations below are merely my suggestions. The lovely feature photo for this post is by Maria_art/Adobe.
All of the White Horses, and the two giants, mentioned in this post are easily seen from nearby roads. England being England, and a nation of both footpaths and walkers, you can also walk to most of them. This gives a chance to both get up close, which can be weird and magical in its own way, and have the best vantage points for standing back to get a good look. Most of these walks are also very pretty, and pretty easy. For great site that has detailed information on 9 walks to White Horses discussed in this post ( and few that aren’t ) including maps, how-to, stories, and links to phone apps and suggestions for places to stay, check out http://whitehorsewalk.co.uk
The huge Osmington White Horse, ridden by King George, and the Cerne Abbas Giant are both in Dorset, which is a beautiful county and often overlooked. It was also the home of Mary Anning, who lived in lovely Lyme Regis, and who you can read about in the Dinosaur Dreams post on this site. These are easily combined. For good general information on Dorset, you can check out the country info site at http://visit-dorset.com/things-to-do/cerne-abbas-giant-p133383
There is a particularly pretty walk to the Wilmington Long Man, who is in Sussex, six miles inland from Eastbourne. The Litlington White Horse, near Cuckmere (Oh, those British names) is not far away. This is also a really lovely part of the country which is often a bit overlooked. I grew up in this neck of the woods, so I’m probably biased! There is a particularly beautiful coastal walk along Beachy Head and a set of cliffs called The Seven Sisters, both of which are very close to The Long Man. When we went we always used to stop at The Tiger Inn in lovely East Dean. Now you can not only stop for a drink and lounge about on their pretty lawn, but stay there, too. Forget the snarky reviews on Tripadvisor – it’s fab! And a great base for this very pretty part of Sussex. They’ll even book you a room in their light house, or one of their holiday cottages, if you don’t like the 16th century pub. See for yourself at http://beachyhead.org.uk/the-tiger-inn/ For good info on the Long Man, directions, parking etc, and for other historic places to visit in Sussex, check out http://sussexpast.co.uk/properties-to-discover/the-long-man