The Uffington White Horse

England has quite the collection of murals of horses on hillsides, and the oldest of these is the Uffington White Horse. No-one seems to know precisely how old it is, but Wikipedia puts it at over 3,000 years! We ventured out on Saturday with Julian and Shelley to have a close-up look at it for ourselves.

As it turns out, the close-up look isn’t quite as impressive as the Google maps top-down approach, but it does give you an idea of just how big it is. Pretty big.

Right next to the white horse is Uffington Castle, however this one is a bit of a conundrum. See, all that actually remains of the castle is the site upon which it was built – a huge circular landmass surrounded by a ditch (most likely an old moat). But, there’s really no signs of anything actually having ever been constructed there. What’s more, apparently it wasn’t even a castle, but instead just a hill fort!

Still, a huge ex-moat-like-ditch can be rather entertaining, as Julian proved to us. See, he has this great trick which you can use to traverse from one side of a ditch to the other, by simply running down one side as fast as you can, and then expending your built up momentum to effortlessly ascend to the other side. Sadly for him, the uphill journey proved slightly steeper than he had anticipated, which threw all of his calculations off, and saw him running face-first into the grass. Oh, if only I’d been videoing…

While we were in the area, we also took a short wander down to Wayland’s Smithy – two words which when combined somehow mean, “old tomb”. Apparently there were 14 people buried in there, but they’ve long since departed (heh heh) and now it feels more like a man-made cave.

Truth be told, it wasn’t all that exciting, but the walk in the sunshine and fresh country air was delightful! The company wasn’t too bad either, though we had suspected that would be the case when we started out.