The White Horse

We decided to take my parents to the Stonehenge. As we heads to Stonehenge, we saw on our map a few signs which screamed "tourist attractions". A few of them are the infamous White Horses. SP read about these figures of White Horses ages ago and he believed it was antiquity. So we thought it was 'worth seeing'.

The first White Horse (the Cherhill White Horse) we saw wasn't very impressive, as we could only view it from a distance. So we picked another one from the brochure and head for the oldest, and one of the more accessible White Horse - the Westbury White Horse.

The Westbury White Horse is supposed to be one of the best situated, being high on a very steep slope and offering a panoramic view of the surroundings.


The Westbury White Horse

It is situated underneath Bratton Castle, an Iron Age hill fort.

Some people actually suggested that the horse was an ancient figure created in 878, possibly to commemorate the battle of Ethandun, in which King Alfred fought off Viking invaders. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the battle took place in the area or that the original horse is this old. So what SP read was only speculation.

Anyway, the white horse is known on the site for at least three hundred years so while it's not exactly antiquity, it is still worth seeing. As you can see from the photo, the horse looks like a normal horse 'standing' on the hill. But the horse hasn't always look like this. Instead, it looked more like this:

(Source: http://wiltshirewhitehorses.org.uk/images/oldwesmaphorse.jpg)

In 1778, a guy named George Gee decided that the old version wasn't a good representation of the horse so he re-cut it to form the basis of the present day design.

And in the early twentieth century, someone decided to add concrete to hold the edging stone in place. The decision to concrete it over was made to stop the chalk surface of the horse, which rests on a steep slope, from crumbling away. One 'good' idea follow by the next, in the 1950s, it was decided that it would do good to the maintenance budget to paint the figure in white. The concreting was again repeated in 1995, giving us the now-a-day Westbury White Horse.

My thoughts? As we had towards to the horse, the wind grew much stronger and I almost got blown off the hilltop (serious!). Even then, I braved the wind and I was rewarded with an unoriginal, not-old-nor-new, painted and concrete horse?

You may say, the view must be great from the hill top. Yes, it was, except that there is this massive chimney of a local cement works right in the middle of my wonderful view.

Life is full of irony.