#hill figures

[frogshunnedshadows]

This Massive Hillside Figure Has Mystified Historians for Centuries. Now, Donations Have Secured the Surrounding Landscape

The National Trust has purchased the land around England's Cerne Abbas Giant, which will help protect the mysterious chalk figure and nearby

They saved the giant dong giant! Huzzah!

[unearthly-strange-and-delightful]

The Panel of the Horses (detail) in The Chauvet-Pont D'arc Cave, France

The Uffington White Horse, Oxfordshire, UK

Statuette of a Horse, 750-730 BCE, Ancient Greece

Intaglio Depicting a Horse

Intaglio: 1st century, Ancient Rome

Setting: date unknown (modern)

A good man will take care of his horses and dogs, not only while they are young, but when old and past service.—Plutarch, Greek philosopher, historian, and biographer source

[bluecote]

[microwaveexplosion]

The Uffington Horse, a wonder of Britain, may be 3,000 years old.

[cat-appreciator]

It’s cold and I don’t wanna get out of bed so fuck it, let’s talk about the White Horse of Uffington.

There are a lot of hill figures in the south of England, in places where the topsoil is a thin layer of grass on top of a thick layer of Upper Cretaceous chalk. You just peel back the sod and there it is, ready to be a regimental badge, a horse, or a guy with a giant dong. In the case of the White Horse of Uffington specifically, there’s a bit more soil underneath the sod, so you dig a ditch and fill it with crushed chalk.

Most of these figures aren’t actually all that old, ~500 years old or less, because grass is an incredibly tenacious plant and it grows back over the chalk. If you want to keep a hill figure around it requires regular maintenance. The White Horse has been dated to the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age, meaning it could well be three thousand years old (there’s a technique called optically stimulated luminescence where scientists can tell when a thing was last exposed to light; they dug down to the bottom of the chalk filled trench and tested the soil underneath. The Horse dates to between 1300 and 550 BC).

Again - and this is the part where I get emotional and weepy - a hill figure requires regular maintenance. Without it, the White Horse would be invisible in a few decades. So every seven years, the villagers of the surrounding communities get together with their baskets of chalk and hammers (and, in more recent years, knee pads) and pound fresh quartz into the trench to prevent it from being overgrown.

With some interruptions during modern times (the Horse was covered in sod during WW2 so it couldn’t be used by the Luftwaffe for navigation) the scouring of the Horse has taken place every seven years for three thousand years. The original builders spoke a Celtic language, or possibly a lost pre-Indo-European language. They didn’t have the same culture or religion or worldview or anything to the people preserving the Horse today. We don’t know what the Horse meant to them. And yet for three thousand years, every seven years, Roman Britons or Saxons or medieval peasants or Clive from down the way have faithfully got together to scour the Horse, to carry it forward from an unknown past to an unknown future.

It’s a tradition even more remarkable for the fact that there’s no point for the Horse’s existence except the fact of the Horse’s existence. This isn’t some high ritual (like the rebuilding of the Ise shrine in Japan, which is connected to the imperial family) it’s a bunch of farmers crushing up rocks. Empires have fallen, gods have faded out of memory, but the Horse continues.

[lucylyall]

Paid a visit to the Uffington White horse over the weekend, a 110m long chalk hill figure about 3000 years old. I love how weird it looks. Especially from ground level, when you really wonder at the organisation involved in getting it looking good from a distance.

I can confirm from previous observation that it is very visible from the hill range a few miles away ... which I'm going to guess was where a different tribe lived ...

There were so many larks flying and singing ... and also several red kites hunting them.

For more on the Uffington White Horse (and for a better picture of it), you can read this ...

A white horse of chalk both defines and defies a common understanding of what English heritage is, and is not.

Oooooor maybe just this:

Leia's Legacy

To make sure they stabbed the right people, ancient Britons formed primitive gangs, called tribes, and like many gangs they got into graffit

[ailishsinclair]

The White Horse on Mormond Hill

NEW post! The White Horse on Mormond Hill #Aberdeenshire #hillfigures #history

The white horse on Mormond Hill in Aberdeenshire can be seen from miles around. Constructed of white quartz, the horse is said to have been built by a Captain Fraser in the 1790s after the Flanders campaign. His own horse was shot from under him in battle and his sergeant offered his mount as replacement and was shot in the process. The white horse is a memorial to Sergeant Henderson. I have…

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[pagansquare]

St George & The Uffington White Horse

The Uffington White Horse is a huge figure of a horse carved into the turf and filled in with white chalk.  People in the area have been doing this for at least 3000 years.  The figure needs consistent upkeep to remain visible, which was traditionally done every seven years.  Today it is done "as needed". (eye roll)    Not everyone agrees that the figure was originally intended to be a horse, although it has been consistently called horse since at least the 11th century.  Some scholars believe that Horse may have been the totem of a local tribe, while others believe it is a solar horse, that is, one that draws the chariot of the sun.   

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