The Memory of a Horse

Beyond the enigma of an ancient site, the enduring intimacy of care

About a dozen miles east of Swindon in the south of England, there is a horse on a hill—a horse cut into the turf and filled with chalk, its striking outlines measuring roughly one hundred meters from head to tail, making an equine flourish on the brow of the Berkshire Downs just visible from the Great Western Railway. 

My own memory of the White Horse is a scattered thing—a fragile crossing of maps and notes, scents and bodily sensations. I find its traces too in the Scheduled Monuments Listing for Historic Britain, in Google Earth and online maps, and in the various articles, contemporary and historic, that tell the story of the Horse or pry open its origin. I find it also in the recollected sound of mockingbird and starling and robin, in the weft of the wind passing over the wheat fields, and the child-chant, up to the blood! up to the blood! rising from a gaggle of red-shirted kindergarteners atop Dragon Hill; in the afterburn eyespots of mulberry blossoms overhanging the Ridgeway; in the tufts of grass-entangled sheep's wool trailing in the wind. 

The Horse seems to be some three thousand years old, originating in the Late Bronze Age—long before the arrival of Roman, Saxon, Norman, and Dane. Since the form of the Horse first was cut into the soil, this landscape has faced a bewildering enjambment of transformations: the advent of agriculture and the arrival of domesticated animals, the coming of Roman rule, the migration of settled populations from fortified hill sites to valley hamlets and farms, the emergence of feudal land use, and subsequent transformation of the landscape by early-modern enclosure into a sheep-dotted pastoral realm. Empires rise and fall, and the Horse endures.

In a 1999 article in the journal Representations, Philip Schwyzer gathers the theories of the Horse’s origin: in the eleventh century, chroniclers deemed it a marvel and wonder of nature; early-modern antiquaries attributed it to the Wessex King Alfred and his brother Æthelred, who had it made to commemorate of their defeat of the Danes at Ashdown in 871; and popular lore held that the Horse represented the steed of St. George, who spilled the great serpent’s blood on Dragon Hill, a flat-topped hillock that stands like an altar before the soaring, arched choir loft of the White Horse.

Across these tellings, the Horse has endured, not by some magic or cunning trick of its fabrication, but through the attention and care of those who live nearby. Today, the "scouring of the Horse" is a bank-holiday gathering for volunteers; every few years for these many centuries, people have gathered to weed the chalk beds and pound them into compact brightness (for readers who will be in the UK this summer, National Trails will hold scouring sessions in July and August). Schwyzer inventories some of the Horse's many attendants:

At some point it passed into the curatorship of the people known to Caesar as the Atrebates, and from them to the Romano-Britons who buried their dead in the long oval mound to the east of the White Horse. The scourings continued after the Romans withdrew, and the responsibility fell to Saxon settlers who may well have recognized in the Horse a comfortingly familiar religious symbol. The meaning of the Horse to the Christian denizens of Wessex who scoured it in later generations must have been a different matter, and so it has been for all the various forms and fashions of “Englishmen” who have inhabited the region since. 

For the most recent inhabitants of these lands, the Uffington White Horse is often described as “enigmatic.” In 2003, the Guardian journalist Mark Townsend called the Horse “a masterpiece of minimalist art” with a mysterious past, observing that “(n)obody knows why the Bronze Age people dug trenches nearly 3 ft deep and filled them with virgin chalk to create an immense image that can only be seen properly from the air.” Townsend’s nobody-knows-why trope feels shopworn and obligatory; like other such figures—the Nazca Lines of Chile's Atacama Desert; Ohio’s Serpent Mound—the White Horse is largely interpreted as a landscape feature designed for the bird’s eye view. This is the first picture you see of the Horse if you look it up online or search for it on Google Earth. And seen from the sky, the figure is a great puzzle. Its makers could not have experienced it as we do, we who come from above. What message were they hoping to convey, and to whom? What made them conceive such a work on such a scale? What were they trying to tell us?

These are modern questions, peering back down the ages, much as the aerial view comprehends the site from above. It’s not that they aren’t compelling—at the rough time of its making, horses were new to the inhabitants of Britain; it’s hard not to wonder how they who made the Horse saw this creature and their relation to it. But the question is distancing. What if we come to the Horse as its creators must have done—over the landscape, step by step?

I come to the Horse over the Ridgeway, the ancient walking path that runs east-west 87 miles over the Wessex Downs. This path here is accessible from the village of Ashbury, reached from Swindon via the no. 47 West Berkshire Council bus, which climbs the dipping, hedge-hemmed lanes of Bishopstone and Hinton Parva before making a stop at the Rose & Crown Pub in Ashbury; disembarking here, one walks north on the Ashbury Hill Road, which rises through past field and glade to the Ridgeway a little more than a mile from the village center.

Already some two thousand years old by the time the Horse was made, the Ridgeway follows the spine of the chalk escarpment that underlies much of the Wessex region—and is kin to a whole complex of chalk formations, including the South Downs and the chalk caves of Champagne region across the Channel, all of which were laid down during the Cretaceous, when much of northern Europe was covered by shallow seas. The chalk can be hundreds of meters deep; along the ridge of the downs, it rises to the surface, its whiteness is apparent where it lies compounded with surface soils. In the view below, White Horse Hill is the folded ridge on the horizon at center left, the Ridgeway coursing brightly, dipping and winking as it wends toward the Hill, its weedy verge giving way to patterned fields, some still awaiting planting.

The Ridgeway itself is broad and flat, a rough terrazzo of chalk, soil, and compacted turf, scored in places by the imprint of horseshoes. Several times between Ashbury Hill Road and the top of the Down, it is intersected by "restricted byways"—rutted jeep trails, which give access to the farm fields along the route, most of which, in late May, are dressed in the stiff green of spring wheat. Who owns this land? I wonder; I know just enough about land tenancy and the history of enclosure to make my speculations dangerous. The person driving the tractor coursing the far edge of the field to the south—is he a tenant or an owner; does he live on the down or below in the village? Whose sheep graze on White Horse Hill; who keeps up the fences?

Other ancient sites dot the Ridgeway, including Wayland’s Smithy, a neolithic long barrow already ancient when the Horse was cut, and Uffington Castle, a hill fort likely inhabited by its makers and tenders.

The horse itself is not visible from this approach, although signage points the way, prompting the walker to depart from the Ridgeway and strike out over pastures, taking care to observe niceties. I climb a stile to cross the fence, nearby is a sign announcing the heritage status of White Horse Hill. It’s striking that the largest type on the sign is devoted to the topic of sheep.

From the fence, cropped grass sweeps up and away, dotted with sheep turd and yellow hawkbit blooms that bound in the breeze. Shreds of wool trace the line of the wind, too, where they catch here and there in the turf. 

The presence of sheep—how they transform the landscape, and how access to land was changed for them—pattern and haunt the Vale of the White Horse.

Here, from the brow of White Horse Hill, the landscape’s pastoral character is very much in evidence. We're looking down into a feature called “The Manger,” which has the shape of a glacial cirque. 

The elevation of the landscape here is hard to gauge, but the drop is precipitous. (In my photo, sheep are visible down there, filing along a path of their own, but they’re hard to spot in this view.) With the Manger and its other cusps and folds, the Hill juts like a molar tooth from the vast jaw of the Ridgeway. To the north of this deep-sculpted glacial declivity, the landscape rolls off into fields, pastures, hamlets. We’re looking northwest here; the Great Western Railway, running horizontally with the band of trees from east to west, lies roughly halfway to the windmills some four miles away.

It’s from this spot, turning to the right, that one gains a first glimpse of the Horse, by turning from northwest to northeast. And a glimpse is all one gets—or rather, a glimpse here, another there, the Horse revealing now a forelock, now a beaked snout—the whole a thing of shreds and patches, markedly different from the aerial overview by which the Horse is best known. 

Indeed, the Horse up close is shy, skittish, its white members flashing in and out of view among the folds of its deeply-contoured bed. In the land, there is a remarkable sense of bodily form; toiling up and across the lifting hill, one is intimately juddered and bumped by equine contours. I find myself wondering if the ones who made the Horse were guided and inspired not by some abstract ideal, but by this vast body already present in the land. Maybe the medieval commentators had it right: before there was a horse, the Horse was here.

Gazing on this landscape, coaxing the imagination to source stirrings of bronze-age meaning-making on the land, I’m also gazing on the history of enclosure, the transformation into private pastureland of commons long devoted to shared grazing, farming, and foraging. The grassy down, the flocking sheep, exert a powerful influence; gazing on grazing, it's easy to miss the register of change in the turf-softened folds of the land. How did the landscape of the Horse read in the Bronze age, before the sheep came to graze here? What forms of land use prevailed when the hill fort throve; when the land first was farmed under open-field practices; when the Romans left; before the imposition of the scheduled-monuments program with its signage, parking lots, and websites? Whose memory is the Horse?

Perhaps we should instead ask, how are we the horse’s memory? The Horse is a standing wave of attention and care, which belongs to all of its times. To covet its lost originary meaning is to miss something crucial about its persistence in the land, and in us. Children run to the summit of Dragon Hill, crying up to the blood! up to the blood! Families and neighbors kneel in the grass to pull the tough stalks of hawkbit that encroach on the chalk, to pound dusky shards to white powder. Over the hills, clouds are ever gathering, but we have the chalk and the hill and the great body of the Horse, its glamor, its embrace. Now as in the time of its making, its meaning is this treasury of shared attention, experience, and care.