A horse is a horse, of course, of course, unless …*

Saturday 2 Oct (Part II)

Unless the horse is the Uffington white horse, which, to be perfectly honest, seems to be rather ahead of its time in terms of abstract representations.

It’s also one of those frustrating places where it’s hard to capture the magnitude of the thing you’re seeing, not least because I couldn’t find a view point that allowed me to see the entire horse in all its glory. I think the best view would have been obtained from the air, a point of view its creators may have been able to imagine but perhaps not be able to imagine attaining. All I could do was to take a number of photos to let you somehow combine them to get the intended effect. The photo below left gives you a sense of scale from the people walking down beside the tail; the whole horse is over 100m long.

As you can see, and as I tried to indicate in the first paragraph, the really unusual thing is how stylised it is. It is as if someone just quickly sketched lines to give the essence of a horse: the body is really only indicated by the arc of the back, two of the legs are detached from the horse itself, and the head is roughly square. It has to be maintained regularly, as the grass will grow over the chalk if left to its own devices, so it is possible that the shape has changed over the 3000 years since it was first constructed … although apparently there is ancient coinage of similar design so perhaps it hasn’t changed much at all.

There are some other interesting things in the vicinity, including Uffington castle, which is a big hill fort with two concentric dirt banks/walls separated by a ditch. There is also Dragon Hill, seen in the second photo below. Legend has it that this is where St George slew the dragon, and the patch of chalk where the grass doesn’t grow is where the dragon’s blood was spilled. The hill itself is natural, but I believe that the flat top was man-made.

So what does it all mean? Is the horse a form of early advertising (“Eat at Joe’s”)? Is it the logo of the local Bronze Age football team? Was it made by a bunch of yobs after a boozy night out (“Let’s go and vandalise that hillside over there”)? Is it a tribute to a winner of the Uffington Cup (“The race that stops a village”)? Was there a budding Picasso among the Golgafrinchan hairdressers, middle management men and telephone sanitisers who carved the horse after the B Ark crashed into Earth and messed up the calculations of the Ultimate Question? Was it the result of an “art in public spaces” policy (and all the locals hated it: “That’s messed up our view, that has” “It’ll bring down the value of our hill fort” “Why can’t they make art that we actually understand?”)?

Who knows? It’s pretty amazing, though, especially at dusk on a blustery grey day.

* I’ve never seen Mr Ed.