3,000 Year Old White Horse Of Uffington, England
An iconic geoglyph set in a sacred landscape.
There are upwards of fifteen White Horse rock-sculptures in Britain, most cut into chalk hillsides where the turf is thin. They date from the late 18th through to the 20th century, and all pay homage to the White Horse of Uffington, Oxfordshire.
Measuring 110 x 38.5metres (360 x 126ft), it was cut into the undulating chalk hillside before the Romans invaded these islands and is Europe’s only confirmed prehistoric hill-figure. It was long believed to be Iron Age: there’s an Iron Age hillfort within 200m of it, and the animal’s stylised sweeping lines have been found on Celtic coins.
However, excavations in 1996 re-dated it to the late Bronze Age, around 800–700BC, or possibly earlier. Archaeologists also found that the figure hadn’t simply been de-turfed to lay bare the white rock beneath; a series of trenches had been hacked from the chalk to a depth of three feet, and crushed chalk used as an in-fill. The builders, who couldn’t see the entire design as they worked in the folds of the hillside, had meant this to be permanent.
