The Uffington White Horse is a highly stylized prehistoric hill figure,
110 m
long, formed from deep trenches[1] filled with crushed white chalk. The figure is
situated on the upper slopes[2] of White Horse Hill in the
English
civil parish[3] of Uffington (in the county of Oxfordshire,
historically Berkshire),
some 8 km
south of the town of Faringdon and a similar distance west of the town of Wantage
Best views of the figure are obtained from the air, or from directly across the
Vale, particularly around the villages of Great Coxwell,
Longcot
and Fernham.
The figure presumably dates to
"the later prehistory", i.e.[4] the Iron Age
(800 BC–AD 100) or the late Bronze Age (1000–700 BC). This view was
generally held by scholars[5] even before the 1990s,
based on the similarity of the horse's design to comparable figures in Celtic art,
and it was confirmed following a 1990 excavation led by Simon Palmer and David
Miles of the Oxford Archaeological Unit.
Iron Age
coins that show a representation comparable to the Uffington White Horse have
been found, supporting the early dating of this artifact; it has also been
suggested that the horse had been fashioned in the Anglo-Saxon
period, more particularly during Alfred's reign, but there is no
positive evidence to support this.
The Uffington is by far the oldest of
the white horse figures in Britain
It has long been debated whether the chalk figure was intended
to represent a horse or some other animal. However, it
has been called a horse since the 11th century at least. A cartulary[6] of Abingdon
Abbey, compiled between 1072 and 1084, refers to "mons albi
equi" at Uffington ("the White Horse Hill").
The horse is thought to represent a
tribal symbol perhaps connected with the builders of Uffington Castle.
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