Cherhill White Horse is a

hill figure A hill figure is a large visual representation created by cutting into a steep hillside and revealing the underlying geology. It is a type of geoglyph usually designed to be seen from afar rather than above. In some cases trenches are dug and r ...

on Cherhill Down, 3.5 miles east of

Calne Calne () is a town and civil parish in Wiltshire, southwestern England,OS Explorer Map 156, Chippenham and Bradford-on-Avon Scale: 1:25 000.Publisher: Ordnance Survey A2 edition (2007). at the northwestern extremity of the North Wessex Downs h ...

in Wiltshire, England. Dating from the late 18th century, it is the third oldest of several such

white horses ''The White Horses'' is a 1965 television series co-produced by RTV Ljubljana (now RTV Slovenija) of Yugoslavia and German TV (''Südwestfunk''). Plotline The story follows the adventures of a teenage girl Julia (Helga Anders) who leaves Belgrad ...

in Great Britain, with only the

Uffington White Horse The Uffington White Horse is a prehistoric hill figure, long, formed from deep trenches filled with crushed white chalk. The figure is situated on the upper slopes of White Horse Hill in the English civil parish of Uffington (in the cerem ...

and the

Westbury White Horse Westbury or Bratton White Horse is a hill figure on the escarpment of Salisbury Plain, approximately east of Westbury in Wiltshire, England. Located on the edge of Bratton Downs and lying just below an Iron Age hill fort, it is the oldest ...

being older. The figure is also sometimes called the Oldbury White Horse.

Location

Facing towards the north-east, Cherhill White Horse lies on a steep slope of Cherhill Down, a little below the earthwork known as Oldbury Castle. It can be seen from the

A4 road This is a list of roads designated A4. A4 is the name of several roads: * A004 road (Argentina), a road connecting Buenos Aires-La Plata highway with the Juan María Gutiérrez circle * A4 motorway (Austria), a road connecting Vienna and Nickelsd ...

and the nearby village of

Cherhill Cherhill is a village and civil parish in Wiltshire, England. The village is about east of the town of Calne, on the A4 road towards Marlborough. The parish includes the village of Yatesbury. Overview Cherhill has a population of around 700 ...

.The Cherhill or Oldbury white horse
at wiltshirewhitehorses.org.uk, accessed 18 July 2008 A good viewpoint is a

lay-by A rest area is a public facility located next to a large thoroughfare such as a motorway, expressway, or highway, at which drivers and passengers can rest, eat, or refuel without exiting onto secondary roads. Other names include motorway servi ...

alongside the westbound carriageway of the A4 where it passes below the horse. From near here, a

footpath A footpath (also pedestrian way, walking trail, nature trail) is a type of thoroughfare that is intended for use only by pedestrians and not other forms of traffic such as motorized vehicles, bicycles and horses. They can be found in a wide ...

climbs the hill towards the horse.Cherhill White Horse
at hows.org.uk, accessed 18 July 2008 Near the horse is an

obelisk An obelisk (; from grc, ὀβελίσκος ; diminutive of ''obelos'', " spit, nail, pointed pillar") is a tall, four-sided, narrow tapering monument which ends in a pyramid-like shape or pyramidion at the top. Originally constructed by Anc ...

called the

Lansdowne Monument The Lansdowne Monument, also known as the Cherhill Monument, near Cherhill in Wiltshire, England, is a 38-metre (125 foot) stone obelisk erected in 1845 by the 3rd Marquis of Lansdowne to the designs of Sir Charles Barry to commemorate his ancest ...

, visible in some photographs of the White Horse.

Inspiration

The Cherhill horse may have been inspired by the first such Wiltshire horse, that at Westbury, which had just been remodelled. The origins of the Westbury horse are more obscure. Unlike the

Oxfordshire Oxfordshire is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in the north west of South East England. It is a mainly rural county, with its largest settlement being the city of Oxford. The county is a centre of research and development, primarily ...

(historically

Berkshire Berkshire ( ; in the 17th century sometimes spelt phonetically as Barkeshire; abbreviated Berks.) is a historic county in South East England. One of the home counties, Berkshire was recognised by Queen Elizabeth II as the Royal County of Berk ...

), which has been shown to date from the

Bronze Age The Bronze Age is a historic period, lasting approximately from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, characterized by the use of bronze, the presence of writing in some areas, and other early features of urban civilization. The Bronze Age is the second pri ...

, the earliest evidence of the existence of the Westbury horse is in a paper published by the Rev. Francis Wise in 1742. A bold theory for the origin of the first Wiltshire horse is that it commemorates

Alfred the Great Alfred the Great (alt. Ælfred 848/849 – 26 October 899) was King of the West Saxons from 871 to 886, and King of the Anglo-Saxons from 886 until his death in 899. He was the youngest son of King Æthelwulf and his first wife Osburh, who bot ...

's victory over

Guthrum Guthrum ( ang, Guðrum, c. 835 – c. 890) was King of East Anglia in the late 9th century. Originally a native of what is now Denmark, he was one of the leaders of the "Great Summer Army" that arrived in Reading, Berkshire, Reading during April ...

and the Danes at the

Battle of Ethandun At the Battle of Edington, an army of the kingdom of Wessex under Alfred the Great defeated the Great Heathen Army led by the Dane Guthrum on a date between 6 and 12 May 878, resulting in the Treaty of Wedmore later the same year. Primary s ...

, in 878. Another is that it was carved in the early 18th century as a show of loyalty to the new royal house, the

House of Hanover The House of Hanover (german: Haus Hannover), whose members are known as Hanoverians, is a European royal house of German origin that ruled Hanover, Great Britain, and Ireland at various times during the 17th to 20th centuries. The house orig ...

, the

white horse A white horse is born predominantly white and stays white throughout its life. A white horse has mostly pink skin under its hair coat, and may have brown, blue, or hazel eyes. "True white" horses, especially those that carry one of the dominant ...

being a heraldic symbol of the

Electorate of Hanover The Electorate of Hanover (german: Kurfürstentum Hannover or simply ''Kurhannover'') was an electorate of the Holy Roman Empire, located in northwestern Germany and taking its name from the capital city of Hanover. It was formally known as ...

. One writer on the subject has commented "...the hillside white horse can be a slippery creature, and the origins of some are impossible to establish with any certainty."Home page: An introduction to the white horses
at wiltshirewhitehorses.org.uk, accessed 18 July 2008

History

The figure at Cherhill was first cut in 1780 by a Dr Christopher Alsop, of

, and was created by stripping away the turf to expose the

chalk Chalk is a soft, white, porous, sedimentary carbonate rock. It is a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite and originally formed deep under the sea by the compression of microscopic plankton that had settled to the sea floor. Chalk ...

hillside beneath. Its original size was by . Dr Alsop, who was Guild Steward of the Borough of Calne, has been called "the mad doctor", and is reported to have directed the making of the horse from a distance, shouting through a

megaphone A megaphone, speaking-trumpet, bullhorn, blowhorn, or loudhailer is usually a portable or hand-held, cone-shaped acoustic horn used to amplify a person's voice or other sounds and direct it in a given direction. The sound is introduced into ...

from below Labour-in-Vain Hill.Cherhill – 1780
at weirdwiltshire.co.uk, accessed 18 July 2008 His design may have been influenced by the work of his artist friend

George Stubbs George Stubbs (25 August 1724 – 10 July 1806) was an English painter, best known for his paintings of horses. Self-trained, Stubbs learnt his skills independently from other great artists of the 18th century such as Reynolds or Gainsborough ...

, notable for his paintings of horses. Since 1780, the horse has been 'scoured' several times. In 1935, it was dressed with a mixture of concrete and chalk, and it was cleaned up in 1994. A major restoration was carried out in 2002 by the Cherhill White Horse Restoration Group, when the horse was resurfaced with one hundred and sixty

tonne The tonne ( or ; symbol: t) is a unit of mass equal to 1000 kilograms. It is a non-SI unit accepted for use with SI. It is also referred to as a metric ton to distinguish it from the non-metric units of the short ton ( United State ...

s of new chalk, the outline was re-cut, and shuttering was added to hold the chalk in place. This work was supported by a grant of £18,000 from the

National Trust The National Trust, formally the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty, is a charity and membership organisation for heritage conservation in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. In Scotland, there is a separate and ...

. The present surface is made of compacted chalk, and the edges of the figure are well defined. In the 19th century, the horse had a glittering glass eye, formed from bottles pressed neck-first into the ground. The bottles had been added by a Farmer Angell and his wife, but by the late 19th century they had disappeared. During the 1970s, a local youth centre project added a new eye made of glass bottles, but these also disappeared. The eye now consists of stone and concrete and sits at a higher level than that of the chalk surface around it. In 1922, M. Oldfield Howey noted that "At the time of writing (1922) this horse is sadly in need of scouring, as due to the

Great War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

all such things have had to be neglected, but we understand that a local lady has come to its rescue and asked permission to restore it. Formerly the

Lord of the Manor Lord of the Manor is a title that, in Anglo-Saxon England, referred to the landholder of a rural estate. The lord enjoyed manorial rights (the rights to establish and occupy a residence, known as the manor house and demesne) as well as seig ...

was its groom!" In the week of the

coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth The coronation of George VI and his wife, Elizabeth, as King and Queen of the United Kingdom and the Dominions of the British Commonwealth, and as Emperor and Empress of India took place at Westminster Abbey, London, on Wednesday 12 May 1937. ...

in 1937, the horse was floodlit and the letters GE were picked out in red lights above it, with the power coming from a generator at the foot of the hill. The red letters were lit up for five seconds, followed by the floodlights for ten seconds, in a repeating pattern. The hill above the horse belongs to the

. Thirteen such white horses are known to have existed in Wiltshire. Of these, eight can still be seen, while the others have grown over. The

Alton Barnes White Horse Alton Barnes White Horse is a chalk hill figure of a white horse located on Milk Hill some 1,000 metres north of the village of Alton, Wiltshire, England. The horse is approximately 180 feet high and 160 feet long, and was cut in 1812 under the ...

, at Alton Barnes, is known to be based on Cherhill White Horse. Cherhill White Horse 04

References

Bibliography

* Plenderleath, Rev. W. C., ''On the White Horses of Wiltshire and Its Neighbourhood'' (''Wilts Archaeological Magazine'', vol. 14 for the year 1872, pp. 12–30) *Plenderleath, Rev. W. C., ''White Horses of the West of England'' (London: Alfred Russell Smith, & Calne: Alfred Heath, 1885; 2nd edition, London, Allen & Storr, 1892) *Marples, Morris, ''White Horses & Other Hill Figures'' (London: Country Life Ltd, 1949; New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1949) *Bergamar, Kate, ''Discovering Hill Figures'' (London: Shire Publications, 1968, 4th revised edition 1997, )

External pictures and videos

A Drone Video of Cherhill White Horse and Landsdowne Monument
at vimeo.com
Panorama of Cherhill White Horse and Landsdowne Monument
at flickr.com
Cherhill White Horse
at bbc.co.uk
Postcard of the Cherhill White Horse, c. 1910
at hows.org.uk
Cherhill White Horse, close up
at flickr.com
Cherhill White Horse, very close up
at hows.org.uk

External links

Cherhill White Horse location map
from maps.yahoo.com
Interactive map of Oldbury Castle and Cherhill White Horse, Wiltshire
from pagemost.com {{Hill figure Geography of Wiltshire White horses (hill figures) in England History of Wiltshire Tourist attractions in Wiltshire Protected areas of Wiltshire 1780 works