Folk Rite & Fertility · Uffington, Oxfordshire
Uffington White Horse & the Manger
The oldest chalk figure in Britain, a 360ft Bronze Age horse leaping across the scarp above the dry valley called the Manger. Local folklore made the hill a fertility landscape — couples still climb it on midsummer nights — though the documented rite is the seven-yearly 'scouring' festival of the 1700s.
The story
This one is the real thing. Cut into White Horse Hill above the village of Uffington, the White Horse is 110 metres of sleek, abstract line — a streaming back, spindly legs, a strange beaked head — and it is the oldest chalk hill figure in Britain by a wide margin. In the 1990s Julie Rees-Jones and Mike Tite, at Oxford's Research Laboratory for Archaeology, dated the soil in the lowest layers of its trenches by Optically Stimulated Luminescence — among the first such dates from any British site — and got a range of roughly 1380 to 550 BC: the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age. About three thousand years old. Where the Cerne Giant and the Long Man turned out to be young pretenders, the Horse is exactly as ancient as it looks, and then some.
It has survived because people kept scouring it. Left untouched for even a decade, the grass would swallow it. Roughly every seven years the local community re-cut and re-chalked the figure, and the work became the excuse for a riotous fair on the hill: cheese rolling down the steep dry valley called the Manger, wrestling, backsword play, a greased pole, and prodigious drinking. Thomas Hughes — of Tom Brown's Schooldays — went to the scouring of 1857 and wrote it up as The Scouring of the White Horse (1859), the best account we have of how a Bronze Age drawing was kept alive by festivity. The last great scouring-fair was that one; the custom guttered as Victorian England urbanised, and care passed eventually to the National Trust.
Below the Horse sits Dragon Hill, a natural knoll with an artificially flattened top, where legend says St George slew the dragon — the bare chalk patch is supposedly where its poisoned blood spilled. And here is the quiet lesson of the place: the Horse is genuinely, provably prehistoric, and yet it carries almost no fertility or erotic folklore at all. Age and sauce, it turns out, are unrelated. Best seen from the vale to the north, on a clear day, from a couple of miles off.
More stories at this spot
Sources
- National Trust
- Wikipedia
- Sussex Past (Sussex Archaeological Society)
- The Past / Current Archaeology (Rodney Castleden feature)
- English Heritage (Uffington)
- Oxford Archaeology
- Long Man Morris (official)
- Project Gutenberg (Thomas Hughes, 1859)
Nearby on the map
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Documented historySpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.