White Horse magic!
I mentioned earlier in the week that Mr Dizzo and I went to a place called White Horse Hill at Uffington, Oxfordshire on Monday.
White Horse hill is a place of great history and legend and I love it, like Avebury, I find it a very atmospheric, spiritual place, and I wanted to share the wonder of White Horse Hill with you guys!
White Horse hill is named after the horse figure that is carved into the side of it. This is done by lifting off the top later of turf and soil to expose the chalk layer beneath, and create a white figure.
Over the centuries, to preserve it's outline, the horse underwent a ritual scouring every seven years. This was a huge local revelry comprising festivals of food, drink, dancing and cheese rolling. Nowadays, I think the scouring is done by the National Trust, and it certainly isn't accompanied by an alcohol-fuelled bacchanal!
There are several white horses carved across the chalk downland of southern England, but the Uffington White Horse is unique among them, and by far the most impressive. Most of these white horses are a couple of hundred years old, but the Uffington white horse is around 3,000 years old. It's also a very stylised figure, rather than a straightforward horse image, so much so, that there's a school of thought it's not a horse at all, but a dragon!
No-one really knows why the ancient peoples of this area carved the horse, we're just glad they did! There are theories it might have been some kind of territory marker, being so high up on a steep hill, other theories are that it was an emblem of the iron age tribe that lived in that area.
The horse is very difficult to fully enjoy from ground level. You can really get a feel for its size, approx 380 feet from end to end, but to really appreciate it's beauty you need to see if from the air. It's on a steep hillside which slopes down into a flat-bottomed combe called 'the Manger' - presumably that's where Mister White Horse goes and has his dinner!
So, here are a few pictures of the horse as seen from ground level:
And here he is as seen from the air - what a superstar!
It's curious to me that the people who made this masterpiece all those thousands of years ago produced such an incredible piece of work in such a location that they would never be able to fully appreciate it - always assuming they couldn't fly! Questions like that fascinate me, and tht's why I find prehistory, in some ways, more interesting than recorded history.
Here's the Manger as seen from the horse:
At the bottom of White Horse Hill is a small flat-topped hill called Dragon Hill. This hill has a bald patch of chalk on the top it, and it has a lovely legend attached to it:
The legend is that the hill is where St George killed the dragon and it's blood spilled onto the ground, poisoning the soil so that in that spot nothing would ever grow again.
The Dizzos at the fabled bald patch!
So that was a little summary of a lovely day, I'm so happy to have spent my birthday in such illustrious company. And I don't just mean Mr Dizzo! :)
White Horse hill is a place of great history and legend and I love it, like Avebury, I find it a very atmospheric, spiritual place, and I wanted to share the wonder of White Horse Hill with you guys!
White Horse hill is named after the horse figure that is carved into the side of it. This is done by lifting off the top later of turf and soil to expose the chalk layer beneath, and create a white figure.
Over the centuries, to preserve it's outline, the horse underwent a ritual scouring every seven years. This was a huge local revelry comprising festivals of food, drink, dancing and cheese rolling. Nowadays, I think the scouring is done by the National Trust, and it certainly isn't accompanied by an alcohol-fuelled bacchanal!
There are several white horses carved across the chalk downland of southern England, but the Uffington White Horse is unique among them, and by far the most impressive. Most of these white horses are a couple of hundred years old, but the Uffington white horse is around 3,000 years old. It's also a very stylised figure, rather than a straightforward horse image, so much so, that there's a school of thought it's not a horse at all, but a dragon!
No-one really knows why the ancient peoples of this area carved the horse, we're just glad they did! There are theories it might have been some kind of territory marker, being so high up on a steep hill, other theories are that it was an emblem of the iron age tribe that lived in that area.
The horse is very difficult to fully enjoy from ground level. You can really get a feel for its size, approx 380 feet from end to end, but to really appreciate it's beauty you need to see if from the air. It's on a steep hillside which slopes down into a flat-bottomed combe called 'the Manger' - presumably that's where Mister White Horse goes and has his dinner!
So, here are a few pictures of the horse as seen from ground level:
And here he is as seen from the air - what a superstar!
It's curious to me that the people who made this masterpiece all those thousands of years ago produced such an incredible piece of work in such a location that they would never be able to fully appreciate it - always assuming they couldn't fly! Questions like that fascinate me, and tht's why I find prehistory, in some ways, more interesting than recorded history.
Here's the Manger as seen from the horse:
At the bottom of White Horse Hill is a small flat-topped hill called Dragon Hill. This hill has a bald patch of chalk on the top it, and it has a lovely legend attached to it:
The legend is that the hill is where St George killed the dragon and it's blood spilled onto the ground, poisoning the soil so that in that spot nothing would ever grow again.
The Dizzos at the fabled bald patch!
So that was a little summary of a lovely day, I'm so happy to have spent my birthday in such illustrious company. And I don't just mean Mr Dizzo! :)