thomas' hill figures

A couple of further thoughts prompted by having a look through my new (well, new to me, anyway) copy of the Morris Marples book. Firstly, a bit of orientation for those new to the whole chalk hill-figure business: basically the only one of these with any claim to proper antiquity is the White Horse of Uffington, well-established as being at least late Bronze Age or early Iron Age and therefore most likely around 3000 years old. Almost all of the others were created in a spree of enthusiasm for the form lasting about 100 years from mid-18th to mid-19th century. The two giants at Cerne Abbas and Wilmington may have some claim to be older than that, and things like the Whiteleaf Cross and the Watlington White Mark may be Christian sanitisings of earlier pagan symbols (translation: GIANT COCKS) but it's all highly speculative and frankly not particularly convincing. Marples, to his credit, comes to much the same conclusion.

As I said in the previous post, I've visited the Uffington horse a few times, anything up to half-a-dozen or so I would guess. I recall also visiting the Cerne Abbas giant (including its GIANT COCK) during a family holiday when I was a teenager. The only other white horses I recall having actually seen are the Westbury one (which can be seen from the train) and the Cherhill one, which is visible from the A4 and which we stopped at at least once while I was being delivered from Newbury back to Bristol for the start of a university term. We also used to go to a pub on the outskirts of Chippenham (a few miles up the road) for lunch which was called The Lysley Arms at the time and which I see is now called The Pewsham. The food was very nice when we used to go there and looks pretty good now, though I will point out that - now I think about it - I haven't been there for over thirty years. I mean, Christ.

The only other one I think I've seen in the flesh, or in the chalk, if you will, is the Osmington horse which I have this picture of me in the vicinity of looking slightly fat and hungover (though still with a reasonably impressive head of hair) in January 2016. 

Osmington is also, you'll recall, the birthplace of cheese racing, the actual location being the campsite at Osmington Mills a couple of miles down the road from the horse.

Anyway, for no particular reason other than that it amused me to do it, here's the horses in their current form courtesy of Google Maps' aerial photography. 

Don't strain your eyes squinting for the last one, as it's not discernibly there any more (it would have been in the green strip at the bottom of the photo). It is listed in the Marples book as Woolborough but all present-day mapping lists the location as Woolbury. The horse, a small and pretty rough affair made out of flints embedded in the turf, was supposedly still there in the late 1990s after being rediscovered and tidied up a bit but now seems to have subsided beneath the vegetation again.