Uffington White Horse

The Uffington White Horse is barely a horse at all, and that is what makes it unforgettable. Some 110 metres long, it is drawn in a handful of flowing strokes: a long thin body, a beaked head with a single eye, and disconnected lines for legs, as if the animal were galloping out of the hill. It looks startlingly modern, yet optically stimulated luminescence dating after excavations in 1990 placed its making between about 1380 and 550 BC, in the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age. The figure was not simply scraped out of the turf: its makers dug deep trenches into the hillside and packed them with crushed white chalk, which is why the lines have survived.

The horse runs along the upper slope of Whitehorse Hill, facing across the Vale of White Horse, the valley that takes its name from it. From close up it is hard to see as a whole, because of the curve of the hill; it reads best from across the vale, from around Great Coxwell, Longcot or Fernham, or from the air. Up on the hill the horse is only part of the story. Above it is Uffington Castle, an Iron Age hillfort ringed by ramparts; below lies Dragon Hill, a natural chalk knoll with an artificially flattened top; and between them drops the Manger, a steep, smoothly scooped dry valley whose sides are ribbed with terraces cut by the last Ice Age, known as the Giant's Stair.

The oldest written mention comes from a Welsh manuscript, the Red Book of Hergest, compiled between about 1375 and 1425, which describes a white stallion on a hill near Abingdon. For centuries the figure survived because people cared for it. Every seven years or so locals scoured it clean of grass as part of a fair; the 1857 scouring drew some 30,000 people and grew so rowdy that the festival lapsed. In the Second World War the horse was covered with turf so that it could not serve as a landmark for German aircraft. Today the National Trust owns and looks after it, and regular maintenance of the chalk lines resumed in 2009.

The Ridgeway, an ancient trackway that is now a long-distance footpath, runs along the crest just above the hillfort. About 1.5 miles to the south-west along it lies Wayland's Smithy, a Neolithic long barrow, an easy walk that turns a visit into a half-day across a landscape layered with three thousand years of prehistory.

Getting there

White Horse Hill is in Oxfordshire, about 20 km from Carterton and roughly 7 miles west of Wantage, south of the B4507. The nearest airport is Southampton (SOU), about 71 km away. There is a National Trust car park on the hill. The nearest railway stations are Swindon, about 13 miles away, and Didcot Parkway, about 15 miles; bus services from there are limited, and the last stretch is on foot along lanes and footpaths.