cafe @blushingme - Tumblr Blog

Uffington White Horse, sketched by William Plenderleath in The White Horses of the West of England (1892)

#uffington white horse #year of the horse

The Uffington White Horse is not only cool because it is 3000 year old monumental art that shows a bold minimalist elegance and sophisticated geographical engineering that radiates the signature of a skilled ancient artist / engineer or group of them. The chalk looks like sunlit highlights on a running stallion, and the contours of the earthworks look like muscle. This is a fantastic thing in general, and they cut it into a hillside during the Bronze Age, around the time when horse domestication was the hot new tech in the region.

It's also cool because since roughly 1400 BC when it was made, all the different peoples in the area have gone, "I don't know what that is or who made it, but it's cool and we're going to maintain it.

It is thin ditches cut into sod, filled with white chalk rubble. It's only 300-odd ft long. It's way smaller and simpler than it looks.

Every 20 or 30 years vegetation starts regrowing over it, that has to be removed. And everyone has been doing that consistently for 3000 years now. Because it's neat.

People keep taking ownership of a mysterious ancient thing, built by people we don't know for reasons we will never understand, simply because our fellow humans built it, and we still appreciate their work.

A rare possitive testament to innate humanness.

#uffington white horse #year of the horse