Where did Britain’s legendary chalk figures come from?
Dabbling in cod archaeology and potted mythologies
Back in late 2019, I was working as the most junior member of British GQ’s features team. Every week we would be sent dozens of unsolicited books by publishers in the vain hope that we’d run a review of one of them (I think in three-plus years we did… one or two? Maybe?). Most of these books were run-of-the-mill – think 300-page potboiler crime novels, memoirs by vaguely relevant celebrities, non-fiction that went into too much detail about very specific things, like an oral history of, say, the recording of “Let It Be” or the making of the final episode of The Sopranos. Every few months we would organise a company-wide book sale to get rid of them; the money went to charity and the unsold books were then my responsibility to get rid of with the British Heart Foundation. Let nobody tell you journalism isn’t glamorous any more.
Anyway – from time to time, I would take one of these books for myself, if it caught my eye. One of the volumes I picked up was a nice green hardback called The Land of the White Horse. It was by a man called David Miles, who the dust jacket told me was the chief archaeologist at English Heritage. Miles had taken it upon himself to write a book that finally answered a question that had remained unanswered for a thousand years: why is there a 120-foot stylised chalk horse carved into the hillside near Uffington in Oxfordshire?
In fact, there were several questions around the Uffington White Horse that the book teased answers to. Who made it, for example? When? And how?
This is another of those “niche British phenomena that I quite like” essays, I’m afraid. We did darts, and we did Martin Parr. I’ve also written about land art before, in the context of the 1968 Gibellina earthquake and the Sicilian mafia. But today we’re going fully equine. This is the story of England’s chalk figures, via Tolkien, giants, Vikings and brown ale.
To get a better idea of the parameters of the horse, it’s worth having a look at the blurb for Miles’s book:
The White Horse at Uffington is an icon of the English landscape – a sleek, almost abstract figure 120 yards long which was carved into the green turf of the spectacular chalk scarp of the North Wessex Downs […] For centuries antiquarians, travellers and local people speculated about the age of the Horse, who created it and why […] The rich history of this ancient figure and its surroundings can help us understand how people have created and lived in the Downland landscape, which has inspired artists, poets and writers including Eric Ravilious, John Betjeman and J.R.R. Tolkien.
There are about a dozen of these hillside figures in England, most of which stretch across the chalky hills of the South. At least as many have been lost over the centuries, grown over or ploughed in by unromantic farmers.
There’s the Long Man of Wilmington – anyone who has seen The Northman or the Sutton Hoo helmet in the British Museum will recognise some of the symbolism of a man holding two spears; perhaps he is Odin? Then there’s the very NSFW Cerne Abbas giant, once thought to be a pagan god of some sort, and/or Hercules, but also very possibly just the work of dirty-minded local villagers in the 17th century, carved after one too many pints of scrumpy. Horses are common: there’s a 17th-century one at Westbury, one in Yorkshire, and one at Osmington in Dorset. There’s even a chalk kiwi bird in Wiltshire, carved out of the hillside by ANZAC troops just after the First World War.
But Uffington is the weirdest chalk figure, because nobody really knows why or by whom it was made. The horse gives its name to basically everything else around it – ales, a Victorian children’s novel by the man who wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays, a local government district. But its origins are pretty cloudy.
The horse has been in place at least since 1273, when it was first mentioned in Norman records from Abingdon Abbey as “Le Whitchors”. About 30 years later there’s another reference to it; a local village called Compton Beauchamp is referred to as Compton sub Album Equum – Compton “under the White Horse”.
Nonetheless, the horse is certainly older. Was it Celtic, perhaps? As early as the 17th and 18th centuries, when archaeology was really first becoming an area of interest in England, scholars were noting the similarities between the horse and those depicted on pre-Roman coins issued by Brythonic tribes across Europe.
In all these cases, the horses have been rendered in a style that is loose and flowing, not unlike the triskeles and spirals found in Celtic art. The Uffington horse definitely passed the eyeball test for those who argued it was Celtic. But was that a politically expedient source?
Not coincidentally, a new interest in England’s material past dovetailed with the formation of budding nation-state identities across Europe. Intellectuals were looking for origin stories and heroes around which to build their countries’ foundational myths. As such, an Iron Age origin for the White Horse was less popular than a competing idea: that it was carved into the hill near Uffington later, to commemorate a great victory won by Alfred the Great over the Vikings circa 871.
The initial proponent of this theory was a librarian from Oxford University called Francis Wise, who visited the hill in the first half of the 18th century and quickly decided that it had to the location of the Battle of Ashdown, in which Alfred and his brother Aethelred defeated an army of invading Danes. The battle is mentioned in contemporary records including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and Asser’s Life of King Alfred, but nobody actually knows where it happened; the truth is that it was a relatively minor engagement.
The narrative was too compelling and convenient to question, though, and within a century it was accepted knowledge that Uffington was where Alfred routed the invaders.1 Englishmen credited Alfred with founding Oxford University and the Royal Navy (again, not coincidentally two of the contemporary pillars of empire) and with ensuring that the country stayed Christian in the face of marauding, Odin-worshipping berserkers. The horse became an icon of ancient English stoicism and a symbol of local and national pride, right up there with Stonehenge and the druids in the popular consciousness as an embodiment of the murky, often fanciful past.
In 1738, Francis Wise proposed a “Saxon Olympicks” in which every four or five years, the people of the surrounding area would go and clean the horse, and “scour” it back to perfect, gleaming chalky whiteness. The scouring would become a significant event at which hundreds of people gathered to drink and celebrate, with competitions held in cheese-rolling, fighting with staves, horse racing and even, at least once, a “pipe-smoking contest for women”. On and off, they would continue until 1857.
The horse’s more recent history is quieter. It was declared a protected monument in 1929, and 20th-century scholarship revised its likely origin to a point somewhere in between the Celtic and Alfred theories. Nonetheless, the mythology bubbled away – in 1911, the Christian poet and apologist GK Chesterton wrote a 2,700-line poem called “The Ballad of the White Horse”, which likewise focused on the heroic fight between the Christian Anglo-Saxons and pagan Norsemen. Eric Ravilious painted both the Uffington and Westbury horses. During the Blitz, the horse was covered over in turf and branches so it wouldn’t offer the Luftwaffe a marker by which to orient themselves over England.
And then, unsurprisingly, it caught the eye of another young Oxford professor when he started writing fantasy stories in the late 1940s…
You can guess why Tolkien was a fan of the Uffington White Horse. He wrote one of his imaginary peoples, the Rohirrim, as horse-lords; many of their heroes’ names, Éomer and Théoden and the like, borrow wholesale from Old English elements and mean things like “horse-joy”. It’s no coincidence that when the Rohirrim ride out to battle at the climax of The Return of the King, their banner is a white horse on a field of green. And King Théoden of Rohan literally rides his own white horse, called Snowmane:
Suddenly, the king cried to Snowmane and the horse sprang away. Behind him his banner blew in the wind, white horse upon a field of green, but he outpaced it. After him thundered the knights of his house, but he was ever before them. Éomer rode there, the white horsetail on his helm floating in his speed, and the front of the first éored roared like a breaker foaming to the shore, but Théoden could not be over taken.
Fey he seemed, or the battle fury of his fathers ran like new fire within his veins, and he was borne up on Snowmane like a God of old, even as Oromë the Great in the battle of the Valar when the world was young. His golden shield was uncovered, and lo! it shown like an image of the sun, and the grass flamed into green about the white feet of his steed.
But there are white horses everywhere in The Lord of the Rings. There’s Shadowfax, the lord of the horses and Gandalf’s mount, and Asfaloth, the horse that Glorfindel rides (he’s written out in favour of Arwen in the film). Even in the recent anime prequel to the film trilogy, The War of the Rohirrim, the heroine Héra thunders around on a white horse called Ashere.
Tolkien, the ultra-conservative and lover of rolling countryside, must have adored the quaintly and distinctly English nature of the chalk figures such as the White Horse.2 And while there are certainly international comparisons to be drawn – geoglyphs like the Nazca Lines come to mind most obviously – that white chalk is literally inextricable from the landscape.
The same goes for the Cerne Abbas giant. Behind the, uh, giant erection3, there’s a legendary tradition thousands of years old that maintains that giants slumber under hills much like the one the Uffington White Horse is carved into. At the time of England’s greatest need, they will supposedly awake and save us all. They have names: Gog and Magog are the best known, but there are also Cormoran, Blunderbore and his brother Rebecks, Yernagate, Ascapart and Thunderdell. A lot of them hang out in (under) Cornwall, Wales and the West Country, traditionally – I guess it’s hillier.
In my favourite play, Jez Butterworth’s astonishing Jerusalem, a character tries to wake the giants when the South Wiltshire police come to evict him by banging a (possibly) magic drum:
Surrender, South Wiltshire! You are outnumbered…Rise up, Cormoran. Woden. Jack-of-Green. Jack-in-Irons. Thunderdell. Búri, Blunderbore, Gog and Magog, Galligantus, Villi and Vé, Yggdrasil, Brutus of Albion. Come, you drunken spirits. Come, you battalions. You fields of ghosts who walk these green plains still. Come, you giants!
He beats the drum, faster and faster, harder and harder. In the script, it’s not specified whether or not it works. When it’s staged, though…
The most recent chapter in the scholarship around the White Horse of Uffington was written in the 1990s. There was another twist. David Miles himself led an investigation which found that far from being merely scraped-off turf, the horse was actually a trench dug down a metre deep, then filled back in with chalk from another source, and likely dated back past the Iron Age, possibly as far back as 3,000 years ago.
Miles proposed that in the minds of the ancient people who made it, the horse may have “pulled” the sun across the sky, given that certain cultural mythologies featured similar concepts and that it the horse’s north-south orientation would mean the sun rose over it in the east. Whatever the case, it was likely much, much older than anyone had expected – and already ancient when King Alfred did or didn’t fight the Vikings nearby.
Give it a few more years, and I’m sure there will be a new, contradictory theory about the White Horse of Uffington, one that tells us it’s Neolithic, or sub-Roman. I’m sure you can find a good handful of people in the West Country who think it was put there by aliens. In a way it’s moot. It doesn’t matter. It’s not going anywhere.
Aethelred was actually the king at the time. Alfred inherited from him later, but it’s better for the story if it’s Alfred doing the routing.
Though it’s worth noting that there are also chalk figures in Scotland.
I’m aware a trench filled with chalk isn’t really an erection per se, more of a giant cavity. But allow me this one.
Really enjoyed this, thanks for writing. Growing up around Wiltshire I camped several times with my family under the Uffington White Horse. Reading about it here has a nostalgic quality.
Cool post — I had no idea!