Thursday 27 March 2014

The Uffington White Horse, Oxfordshire

Here's another ancient site to set the spine tingling! Of all of the chalk figures in Britain, the Uffington White Horse is thought to be the oldest, dating back to the Bronze Age (1000 - 700 BC), a good 1000 years or more after the completion of Stonehenge! To put that into context, William the Conqueror (1066) was conquering Britain nearly 1000 years ago. So for the Bronze Age people who carved out the White Horse, the Stonehenge builders were at least as distant and as ancient as William the Conqueror is to us today! Quite a sobering thought...

However, back to the White Horse. It was created by digging deep trenches and filling them with chalk. Strangely, the true shape of the figure can only be viewed from the air. Sounds like aliens were involved to me.




This is about the best view you can get of the horse from the ground.


There was a Red Kite flying around the valley in front of the horse.


Fortunately it did come a bit closer!





This is the horses head from above, looking down the valley.


Yellowhammer.

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