Oxfordshire travel trips: A bronze age experience at Uffington's white horse

The Uffington white horse is an enormous prehistoric hill figure that flows across the Berkshire Downs with a gracefully arched back and a humorous smile. By far the oldest geoglyph in Britain, it's formed of crushed chalk, compacted into deep trenches that have been scoured regularly for 3,000 years.

Above it runs the Ridgeway (nationaltrail.co.uk/ridgeway), Britain's oldest road, an ancient track compounded by countless bronze age hooves.

The poet Sir John Betjeman spent most of his married life in this part of Oxfordshire. "We used to have moonlit picnics up on White Horse Hill, masses of us, all conveyed by horse and cart," says his daughter Candida Lycett Green. My dad used to recite Vachel Lindsay's The Congo very melodramatically and bang a tin lid with a stick."

"It is a place of immense solace. The locals say that if you have a problem you need to go up the hill and it makes everything all right."

For local lovers, the hill was also, as her father recalled in his poem To Stuart Piggott, 1975, traditionally "the place for courting".