The White Horse of Uffington
For more than three thousand years, people have been carving enormous figures, or ‘geoglyphs’, into the turf of England’s hillsides. Around forty-eight such hill figures are dotted across the country, though nearly all of them lie on the chalk downland of England’s southern counties. Among the shapes that have been cut are horses, giants, crosses and the badges of army regiments. Most of these carvings were made only within the past three centuries or so, yet a small number are a great deal older.
Probably the best known of them, and certainly the most puzzling, is the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire. Recent re-dating has revealed the figure to be older still than the pre-Roman Iron Age* date once assigned to it. The age of another strange carving — the Striding Man of Ashcombe, in Dorset — is far harder to settle. A good many historians take the figure to be prehistoric, while others argue that it was cut by an artistic monk from a priory nearby at some point between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries.
Making one of these figures was a straightforward matter of stripping away the covering turf so that the bright white chalk beneath was exposed. Left alone, though, the grass would quickly close over the design again, so a sizeable group of people had to clean, or ‘scour’, it at regular intervals. When the customs attached to a figure died out, people stopped troubling to clear the grass and lay bare the chalk outline, and it is largely for this reason that most hill figures have been lost. In addition, because those doing the cutting did not always follow precisely the same line, an outline could gradually shift over the centuries until its shape no longer matched the original. That any ancient hill figure has come down to us at all says much about the endurance of local custom and belief — which, in at least one instance, must reach back thousands of years.
*Iron Age: a period in Britain (800 BCE – 43 CE) that is characterised by the use of iron tools
A one-of-a-kind, highly stylised image, the Uffington White Horse has a long slender body, thin unconnected legs, a flowing tail and a head that ends in a bird-like beak. The graceful animal seems almost to dissolve into the hillside around it. It lies 2.5 km from the village of Uffington, on a sharp slope just beneath Hartsdown Camp — a Late Bronze Age* hillfort of roughly the seventh century BCE — and below the Hartway, a long-distance Neolithic** track.
Bronze Age burial mounds ring the site as well. Close by is the Bronze Age cemetery of Harrowfield Barrows, where more than twenty-five mounds survive in good condition. The carving was set out in a way that makes it very hard to pick out from nearby, and, as with many geoglyphs, it is seen to best effect from overhead. Even so, a reasonable view can be had from several points within the Vale of the White Horse — the valley that takes its name from the mysterious figure — and, when the weather is clear, the outline is visible from as far off as 25 km.
Written traces of a horse at Uffington go back to the 1070s CE, when ‘White Horse Hill’ is named in charters from the nearby Priory of Ashbury; a reference to the horse itself follows shortly afterwards, in 1188 CE. The carving, however, is thought to be far older than this. Because the creature so closely resembles the stylised horses stamped on coins of the first century BCE, it was long supposed that it too belonged to that era.
That view changed after 1994, when the Wessex Archaeological Trust applied Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) testing to sediment drawn from two of the lower layers of the horse’s body, together with a further cut near its base. The technique returned a construction date of somewhere between 1380 and 550 BCE — placing the horse’s origins in the Late Bronze Age or the Early Iron Age.
Should the later end of that span be the true one, the horse’s making would fall within the years the nearby hillfort was in use; on that reading, it may have served as a tribal badge that staked out the land belonging to the fort’s people. A ritual origin is another possibility, the figure having perhaps been cut during some ceremony of the Bronze or Iron Age. Nantia, a goddess of horses honoured both as their guardian and for her ties to the harvest, is what a number of researchers believe the carving depicts. Her cult, though, only crossed to Britain from Gaul (France) at about the start of the first century CE, fully six hundred years or so after the likely date of the carving. What is not in doubt is the powerful ritual and economic role the horse played across the Bronze and Iron Ages, something its recurrence on jewellery and other metalwork confirms. Another candidate is a goddess of home-grown legend: Melwen, whom later Welsh myth pictures as a shining woman robed in gold upon a pale horse.
The ease with which geoglyphs — and the rituals and meanings bound up with them — can vanish suggests that they were only ever meant as passing gestures. That, however, does nothing to diminish their significance. These vast carvings offer an absorbing window onto the minds of the people who made them, and onto the way those people saw the country around them.
*Bronze Age: a period in Britain (c. 2,500 BCE – 800 BCE) characterised by the development of bronze tools **Neolithic: a period in Britain (c. 4,000 BCE – c. 2,500 BCE) significant for the spread of agriculture and the use of stone tools
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Question 1 - 8
Choose TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVEN
1.
England's geoglyphs are spread fairly evenly across every part of the country.
True
False
Not given
2.
Figures of giants occur more often than those of any other kind.
True
False
Not given
3.
On recent testing, the Horse turned out to be a different age from the one long assumed for it.
True
False
Not given
4.
Experts do not all share the same view about when the Striding Man of Ashcombe was made.
True
False
Not given
5.
To make a geoglyph, workers laid white chalk down on top of the turf.
True
False
Not given
6.
A considerable number of England's hill figures have vanished from sight.
True
False
Not given
7.
The ancient burial ground near the Horse is visited by large numbers of people today.
True
False
Not given
8.
The horse goddess Nantia was already being worshipped in Britain before the Horse was cut.
True
False
Not given