The White Horse & the oldness of place

The mist was thick enough to get lost in, without really having to try. Coming down the sodden hillside, I caught sight of white chalk amongst green grass and thought it was a path. It was certainly wide enough to be one. Another few steps forward – hair dripping, glasses rain-speckled – and I realised that it wasn’t a path at all, but a defined outline cut into the hill. My boots were just a few short paces away from an enormous horse’s head. A strip of chalk five paces wide curled away to my right, while in front of me it formed an imprecise rectangle, within which was encased the horse’s white eye.

***

 

I had only previously known the Uffington White Horse through drawings and aerial photos. I had wanted to see it for a long time, so it was ironic I came on a day where the visibility was so poor that I could not even see most of the horse, let alone the view beyond. But I knew the outline well, had been struck since the first time I ever consciously saw it, on the cover of Alan Garner’s book Treacle Walker. Its minimalism is a contrast to the rippling sheen of a living horse, but still carries a strong sense of forward motion. It holds a strange sort of spell for me, somehow expresses an ancientness that can’t be defined in words.

Now I was in the same spot where, 3,000 years ago, people had stood to cut the figure into the hillside. It could have been the mist, which meant I had come upon the horse when I had not been expecting to. Or possibly it was the scale. Though I could not see it, I knew the end of its tail lay just over one hundred metres from where I stood. Or maybe it was a combination of both these things. Whatever the reason, I felt unsettled. In a good way, though; shaken out of my settled sense of self, taken out of modernity. I was stood not in a very old place – for all places, really, are very old – but in an old human place, and to do such a thing is not always a comfortable experience. It is a reiteration of insignificance.

The strangeness of the moment grew. Somewhere above the horse’s back, two figures, smeary dark outlines against the dirty white of the mist. I heard a drumming sound, which my mind blandly thought was someone hammering in fence posts. Several drumbeats passed until realised it was in fact a drum, carried by one of the two figures. Then both their voices began to chant, wordlessly, out into the damp, close air. The sound of it seemed to carry further in the reduced visibility. From the mist a buzzard mewed and below it the faint hum of traffic, all these things happening at once, so that stood in this ancient place in the present moment, time itself also seemed indistinct and though part of me knew it was a Friday morning in December, most of me did not know when I was.

I stood there until I started to grow cold. Then I walked away, eastwards. Turned to look back. Nothing was visible. The moment shrank to immediacies. The drumbeat and the chanting. The water on my face, the cold in my hands, the soft ground under my feet.

A raven on a gatepost as I came down the hillside, flying away at my approach and croaking. One gnarled hawthorn, branching over the horizon.

***

 

It holds me in its grip, this strange old outline. Why? I think part of the answer is in the question – the fact that long ago people thought to make this mark on the landscape, this thing that both is and is not a horse. Also that we do not know why an image best seen from the skies was made at a time when nothing flew but birds, insects, bats.

The horse is a symbol, to me, of the oldness of place. We don’t know why it was cut. Time takes away the knowledge of intention. But it has remained, all these years, as a mark on the land – and the land is even more undefinable and unknowable than the outline itself. I think this is part of why the White Horse stamps itself across my dreams, pulling me back into the earth, chalky bones and white dust sent upwards into summer evenings by passing feet.