The Flight of the White Horse

Poems by Giles Watson

Preface

The Uffington White Horse is a chalk hill-figure in the disputed territory between Oxfordshire, Berkshire and Wiltshire. It is part of an

ancient sacred landscape which incorporates White Horse Hill itself, the artificially levelled Dragon Hill beneath it, the fluted combe

caused by glaciations and known as the Manger or the Devil's Step-Ladder (one of two rival sources of the local River Ock), the Iron

Age Hillfort of Uffington Castle on the top of the downs, and the Ridgeway which connects these sites with the neolithic chambered

tomb, Wayland's Smithy, a string of other hill-forts, and ultimately with the Sanctuary, which is part of the Avebury complex, incorpo-

rating Silbury Hill, West Kennet Long-Barrow, the Avebury stones and ditches and Windmill Hill, the cradle of Neolithic culture in

these islands.

The White Horse has recently been silt-dated to the Bronze Age, and has therefore been recognised as by far the oldest surviving hill-

figure in Britain. It has been maintained through a process of periodic 'scouring', in which inhabitants of neighbouring villages, such as

Woolstone, Kingston Lisle, and Uffington itself, keep the chalk exposed by removing any encroaching grass.

Legend insists that the Uffington White Horse comes to life at night, and drinks at the springs at the base of the Manger. If so, it must

surely be tempted to visit other landmarks along the Ridgeway (which is in itself an ancient monument), and perhaps some of the other

chalk hill-figures beyond. These poems make that assumption.

My illustrations for this little collection were made with chalk pastels, gouache, watercolour, wax-crayon and Ridgeway chalk on paper.

Giles Watson, 2012 All poems and pictures © Giles Watson, 2012.

The White Horse and the Milky Way

Bored of grass, the White Horse

strays onto the Milky Way.

Trodden stars clag his shoes

like Ridgeway chalk in rain.

Across interstellar voids

he trails their detritus.

Beneath his hooves

nebulae are disturbed.

Asteroids scatter.

Black holes open up.

He startles as night

fades – flashes back

to turf – remembers

he is only chalk.

The White Horse Submits to a Scouring

It is essential to remain perfectly still,

And resist the urge to arch the spine

Or cause a minor earthquake. The crust

Of algal bloom itches like eczema,

And the White Horse feels something

Like a whale who cannot rid his

Tail of barnacles. That scratching

With a gleaming trowel keeps him

On the edge of ecstasy and pain,

And when fresh chalk is hammered

Into his pock-marks, it hurts worse

Than the reverse of depilation.

He mustn’t even twitch his tail

Or close his one visible eye.

If only he could raise his head

And nuzzle the nearest child.

Traditionally, the White Horse is scoured every twelve years,

but in fact, algae need to be removed from the surface of the

Horse annually in order to keep it in pristine condition. At

times in the past, the horse has been allowed to grow over,

and it was concealed completely during the Second World

War, so that it could not serve as a landmark for the Luft-

waffe.

The White Horse Drinks at the Spring Beneath the Manger

The spring which feeds the Ock, which feeds the Thames,

Comes out of a pipe in a glassy gush,

A column of molten ice. There is snow

Enough to burden every branch, and a constant dripping

That breeds liverworts and a black and wholesome sludge.

The White Horse comes gingerly, lest his hooves

Be smirched. Chalk mingles with ice crystals. Stars

Become lost in snow. When the White Horse drinks,

There is no disturbance – the perfect spurt

Is not spattered; there is no spray, no sound of lapping –

Just a slow absorption of water into chalk.

The little fossils in the horse’s eyeballs breathe again;

His whole form is a white swarm of animalcules

Swimming for their lives. A white sign forbids

Trespass. A white owl spies a mouse.

Legend insists that the White Horse always drinks at the springs

in a wooded area at the bottom of the Manger (a fluted chalk

combe gouged by glaciation) during his nightly gambols. These

springs feed the local River Ock, although that river has a rival

source near the village of Little Coxwell, not far from Faring-

don.

The White Horse Over Uffington Castle

There is a moment of awkwardness, scrabbling

Out of turf and into sky; the horse must leap

His first hurdle half-lying-down, and shake

The Bronze Age silt from his underside.

Those grassed ramparts are new to him,

Comparatively. He saw the earth thrown up

Long after antlers were used for digging;

Flinched a little as the stakes were driven in.

Tribes made him their emblem, although

The idea of him had grown in a fist-sized

Clump of flint; his spine a glacial contour,

Bared by men with the earliest spades.

From those, they progressed to aeroplanes

And cars, made lights to dim the stars,

Took too much stock of time. He falters,

Bridles, bolts towards Orion.

Uffington Castle is an Iron-Age hill-fort with ditches and

ramparts, at the top of White-Horse Hill.

Visiting Wayland’s Smithy

There is a smattering of asteroids and mist.

Chalk hills are indistinguishable from clouds:

Both have their ramparts, curves, flutes and coombes,

Gallops strewn with orchises and stars. The horse

Traverses them both; soil and space are one

To him, tramping the crowns of beech trees,

Clovers, cumulonimbus. He is held aloft

By winds, the hootings of owls, the breath of ravens.

Sheep and sarsens become identical, sleeping

In the fields. There is whinnying above the Smithy,

An uncanny clattering in air, and out of the moth-dank cave

Something comes. The anvil rings. Sparks and stars

Are one. The horse shudders chalk dust, paces,

Grows calm, raises his fetlock for the shoeing.

Wayland’s Smithy is a Neolithic chambered long-barrow, a

medium-length walk down the Ridgeway from White Horse

Hill. Legend insists that a horse tethered to the Smithy will

be shoed by morning, provided a penny is left in one of the

holes in the stone, in payment for the services of Wayland

the Smith.

Over Russley Downs

The lynchets are a negative print,

A system of shadows, spilled

With a blench of moonlight.

Beech hangers sleep. Villages

Are dormant. The White Horse

Embosses himself in sky,

Like a watermark: an undulation

Of chalk against cloud. Forking

Combes wear uncanny silences

For shrouds, the land engraved

With centuries of human toil,

The dead’s intaglio in soil.

There is an ancient field system of strip-lynchets on the downs above Bishopstone, near to the Ridgeway.

Looking in on Snap Even the White Horse has his work cut out

Finding Snap, though he watched it thrive

As a Celtic village: state-of-the art. It was

Old when its name was written down

In the thirteenth century. By Victoria’s reign

It was known to breed countryfolk

Of uncommon health; they lived into

Their nineties, in ten or fifteen houses,

And the schoolroom doubled as a church.

He cranes his neck through the branches,

Catches a glimpse of Snap High Street:

A rutted track of chalk, erratically cobbled,

Overhung by trees. House foundations

Are marked by nettles. A box tree has

Outgrown its garden, the gardener

Cast out by economics. The farmers

Who lived there could not compete

With cheap American corn, and at the end

Of the century, fell prey to invention:

Frozen meat from Australia, New Zealand

Cost less than lamb from Snap. Mr Wilson,

Butcher, bought up the land. Some folks

Hung on, lived off barter in the schoolhouse,

But time has a habit of whittling away,

And the mortar crumbles for the elder tree.

Street plans become earthworks. Marks.

The White Horse sympathises with marks,

Being one himself. One of those urchin tests

Falls out of his eye, rolls onto the lane. He cocks

His ear for the nightingale who doesn’t sing.

After Fox Hill, the Ridgeway takes a southwards turn, and after it has by-

passed the little town of Aldbourne, and is making its way towards Ogbourne

St. George, it passes the vanished village of Snap. Oddly, there are still sign-

posts to Snap (formerly Snape), although the village completely disappeared

in the early twentieth century.

Nonplussed at Westbury The White Horse cannot suppress a snort

Or two of recognition before that inevitable

Sense of deflation sets in. There are even

Ramparts of a fort in the right position,

And a grassy eye, but the beast itself is staid,

Restrained. It barely blinks or shudders,

Just stands there looking handsome, doesn’t

Paw the turf or kick up a clump of flinty loam,

Tame as a work of taxidermy. The lower lip

Hangs as though anaesthetised. The fossils

In its skin have a look of extinction about them.

Long ago, the Westbury Horse had been

Good company for a gallop through the

Pleiades. On dark nights, the old sickle

Tail was an acceptable substitute

For a moon, and it scattered the lesser

Stars with stumpy legs. But that colt

Has been buried by Enlightenment;

The replacement inert as clay, quite

Drained of skittishness. Nothing works:

No piaffe, passage or pirouette

Can provoke the slightest whinny.

The Westbury Horse was heavily reconstructed in the late eight-

eenth century, but when Richard Gough surveyed the creature

in 1772, he depicted a very different creature from the one

which exists today. The horse suffered further indignities in

the twentieth century, when it was concreted over to prevent

erosion. These days, it is scoured by steam-blasting.

Astray at Cerne Abbas

Things the White Horse will never tell:

The form of worship at his holy hill,

Whose lips have touched the Blowing Stone,

How each hole in it was worn,

How Segsbury, Liddington, Barbury were built,

Whose bones were buried, and whose burnt,

Who went to hunt, who stayed to herd,

Who first cupped hands at Swallowhead,

Which fingernails were grimed with clay

At Windmill Hill, and on which day

The first brooch was cast in bronze,

Where the swifts go on the breeze,

Where Lob goes, how Grim hides

When farms fall into grasping hands –

The ways and words of ancient folk,

How to read their dreams in chalk,

And when and why the virile man

Was etched in turf beneath the moon,

And why his full-frontal girth

Was matched with an Egyptian gait,

And whether he would love, or drub

His foes with an ill-fashioned club,

And how the lovelorn think it right

To lie upon his shaft all night,

And when the Post Office came to grips

With him on postcards. The White Horse skips

A bit, frolicks, thinks to lick

Unmentionable parts, knows he can

Run twice as rampant as any man.

Nobody knows why the Uffington White Horse was etched upon the landscape in the

Bronze Age: perhaps it was a religious symbol – a representation of the horse-goddess

Epona – or perhaps it was merely the symbol of the local warlike tribe. Perhaps it was

merely an echo of the forms indelibly marked on the landscape, and human beings

found it before it was lost. The Blowing Stone is a large sarsen, riddled with holes

made by tree-roots, in a garden a couple of miles to the east of White Horse Hill, and

is reputed to have been blown by King Alfred to summon his men to battle. Segsbury,

Liddington and Barbury are Iron Age forts, strung out like garrisons along the

Ridgeway. Swallowhead Spring is a source of the River Kennet, and the point at

which that body of water is joined by the Winterbourne, which flows through Ave-

bury. It is now, and may always have been, a local sacred place. Windmill Hill is the

site of a Neolithic culture defined by significant technological advances in the art of

pottery-making. Lob and Grim are household names for nature-spirits, mentioned by

multitudes of authors. The Uffington White Horse has taken quite a detour to visit the

Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset – one of the few chalk hill-figures whose provenance is

hotly contested. Some affirm that the giant is an ancient representation of a fertility-

god, whilst others question whether such a figure could survive for centuries over-

shadowing a Christian monastery, and insist that it was inscribed in the turf during

the Civil War, or afterwards. The earliest documentary records of the figure were

made in the late 17th Century, but its penis has been a nocturnal point-of-assignation

for couples wishing to conceive for as long as anyone can remember, and it remains

to date the only “pornographic” image which the British Post Office will handle un-

wrapped, with a stamp licked and slapped upon its back.

The White Horse Surveys Silbury Hill

Thirty-five million basketfuls of chalk,

Stone, rubble, soil, excavated chunk

By chunk with antler-spades, stone

Axes, sweat, blisters, deaths of strong

Men – and passed, man to woman,

Woman to man, in a ragged line, worn

With fatigue – and not ever dumped,

But sculpted, stepped, rounded, heaped,

Into a hill filled with offerings: bone,

Mistletoe, ox-ribs, flint, moss. Brawn

Made it, but also brain. Whole lives

Flowed and ebbed. Autumn leaves

Dropped from trees a hundred

And fifty times. Men murdered,

Made love, sowed, reaped, ploughed,

Sowed through short lives, plod

By plod, until one day, it was built.

But why it was built, and what burnt

As sacrifice at its summit, no one

Remembers. The motive is all gone,

And the White Horse was not engraved

In turf in those days. If they grieved

Some chieftain, wrapped in moss,

Time devoured his stripped remains.

Brachiopods in the White Horse’s eye

Open like watches. He scores the sky

In a holding-pattern. BMWs break

Speed-limits on the A-road, brook

No compromise with time, and miss

It all in their frenzied quest for bliss.

The facts and figures relating to the building of Silbury Hill - a gigantic Neolithic mound

shaped like a barrow, but with a ziggurat-structure underlying it, and containing no human

remains – are derived from Aubrey Burl’s authoritative study, Prehistoric Avebury, Yale

University, 1979, pp. 131-133. An arterial road passes close by Silbury Hill, and the Ridgeway

terminates at this point. The hair-raising speed with which many motorists negotiate this sa-

cred landscape is a source of constant grief and irritation. Silbury Hill is the tallest prehis-

toric structure in Europe, but was built before metal tools were invented.

The White Horse Over Avebury Cove

Rime lends sarsens a chalky hue

In moonlight: squat stone and tall

Gaunt in the field. Micrasters cluster

Around the heart of the White Horse.

The ash tree wears its own crust

Of frost, the twigs brittle, upturned.

Beyond ditch and rampart, the church

Is founded on split sarsens, its font

Etched with dragons, each subdued

Beneath a bishop’s feet, his crozier

Raised as if to deal a fatal blow.

The White Horse sees Pagan and Christian

Frozen in stone, each household, walled

With sarsens, turned inwards on its hearth.

Earth is dormant. Chalk horse, fossils,

Flint, stars, frost: these breathe and live.

Avebury is a gigantic stone-circle and henge complex, not

far from Marlborough in Wiltshire. The village which now

nestles amongst the ditches and ramparts was largely built

out of demolished sarsen stones. The iconography of the

font inside Avebury church is often interpreted as a repre-

sentation of the battle between Christianity and paganism.

Micraster is a genus of heart-shaped sea-urchins, which

flourished in the oceans which covered this part of the globe

between the Cretaceous and the Miocene.

The White Horse High-Tails It Over Avebury

It’s that calm arrangement of objects

On a gigantic scale that pleases him

Every time: ditches excavated, mounds

Piled by spades made of shoulderblades

Of oxen, man-killing sarsens transported

On tree trunks, with ropes of nettle

To hold them steady, the thunderous

Clump of Silbury raised out of piles

Small as molehills, the Sanctuary –

Its burden of dead flensed by kites –

And great stone-mouthed barrows,

Where skulls and longbones were filed

Like books in libraries, for future

Reference. The White Horse knows

There is nowhere like it in the world.

Tests of Cidaris give him goosepimples;

There are tremors amongst ancient

Corals in his tail. Then there is the church

Hanging outside the cursus, like

A satellite, or a menhir from a missing

Avenue of stones split by fire

For building houses, and those

Modern roads, gouging through

The village, channelling buses

From Swindon to Devizes. And

To think: the whole place was once

An ocean full of Belemnites

Who preyed, ate, waned, died,

Transmuted to bullets of stone.

The man-killing propensities of the gigantic sarsen stones at Avebury were grue-

somely attested in 1938, when the skeleton of a man (called the ‘Barber-Surgeon’

because he was carrying a pair of scissors and a surgical probe or lance, along

with three coins dated 1320-1325) was discovered beneath one of the stones whilst

attempting to bury it in the earth. It is a fitting testimony to the skills of the Neo-

lithic architects of the Avebury complex that successive attempts at the erasure of

their efforts have failed to obscure the grandeur of their achievement. The church,

and many of the houses in the village which is partly encompassed by the Avebury

Rings were built out of splinters of sarsen. These were obtained from the standing

stones by lighting fires beneath them, causing untold destruction of the archaeo-

logical record, and yet somehow leaving the enduring power of the place quite un-

diminished. Indeed, it could be argued that all of these comparatively recent devel-

opments have only served to enhance the mystique of the place, and further ener-

gise its genius loci.

The White Horse Hides from Prying Eyes Sometimes, the White Horse gets tired

Of celebrity status: loud children treading

In his eye, turning three times and making

Wishes, people setting up easels, thinking

They’re Ravilious, devotees of von Daniken

Insisting in his hearing that he is a message

For aliens – and then the archaeologists

Get going, digging down to his thigh-deep

Underside, sampling silt. A horse has got

To kick heels occasionally; sometimes climbers

On his back tickle and itch like flies. Even

At dark-moon, there is the danger some

Human do-gooder will climb up there, find

He has absconded, leaving behind a dusty,

Horse-shaped trench. And when he has

Scampered off, a mile above the Ridgeway,

Making diversions to visit his chalky

Friends, he risks being spotted by some

Drunken neo-Druid who has staggered

Out of the public house at Avebury

For a pee. It has happened once or twice,

And the White Horse has loped into

The cirrus, then come panting to ground

At Swallowhead, craving water. He lies

Flat as East Anglia, splayed out across

The landscape, his head slotting perfectly

Under the arched bough of an ancient

Willow. A cloutie is sucked inadvertently

Up his nostril. He has to suppress

A sneeze. All around him, there’s an ooze

Of wetness which will make the Kennet,

Augmented by the Winterbourne. His leg

Sinks whitely under the Spirogyra. Now

His breath is held. But no one comes:

No one notices the black shadow of his

Absenteeism, no one reports him

As a U.F.O., and the neo-Druid’s Wiccan

Friend has bought another round of real

Ale. A tardy swallow decides to migrate.

The horse blinks. It begins to rain.

Swallowhead Spring, which is a short walk from Silbury Hill and West Kennet Long Barrow, is regarded as the source

of the River Kennet, although much of the water is supplied by the Winterbourne, which joins the Kennet at the same

point. The spring, with its over-arching willow, is a popular walking destination for modern pagans, who regularly hang

clouties (strips of coloured cloth and ribbon) from the branches of the tree. Large sarsens laid across the river-bed serve

as stepping stones when the river is awash.

At Windmill Hill “There’s not much here,” a tourist said

Earlier today, “Just a couple of barrows,

And we’ve walked all this way. Nice view,

Though. Pity you can’t see Avebury much,

Except for the church. Those trees ought

To be trimmed. And from this distance,

Silbury looks smaller. Darling, aren’t you cold?”

The White Horse hears echoes of that voice

And a thousand others – but the older ones

Have more resonance – and they travelled

Too, importing pottery, limpets and whelks

From the Cornish coast, arrowheads

Of Portland chert, Mendip sandstone,

Cotswold slate. Amid the voices of makers

And merchants, are murmurs of children,

Their bones in the ditches. The White Horse

Inclines his ear, hears yet darker echoes

From layers deeper than Bronze Age barrows:

The laughter of women, rounding pots

Out of Kennet clay, laying the foundations

Of culture. His deepest deposits of silt

Begin to luminesce. He touches ground, prods

With a gentle hoof, feels the thrumming

Of all that existence, under compacted

Earth, and the little buried things carved

Out of chalk come alive at his passing;

The crude phalli throbbing in the loam.

“There’s not much here... barrows... Avebury...

Silbury... church... Darling, aren’t you cold?”

Windmill Hill, a causewayed enclosure which overlooks Avebury, shows signs of habi-

tation and other human activity from the Neolithic through to the Bronze Age. Much of

it remains unexcavated, but the artefacts mentioned in the poem demonstrate that the

Windmill Hill culture was capable of gathering resources from far afield. Among the

most interesting finds are carved chalk objects, including little cups, and erect phalli,

which archaeologists have been quick to associate with fertility rituals. The deepest lay-

ers have yielded rounded pots which are amongst the earliest in Britain, and which

would have revolutionised the preparation and serving of food.

The White Horse Among the Stars The White Horse spent half an hour this morning

Watching Red Arrows. He had to do it; he was pinned

To the hill, and it is inadvisable to blink, with

So many people standing in your face. They spewed

Out red, white and blue smoke, and horses

Of flesh and blood also turned to watch them:

Every stallion and nag for miles around, facing

In the same direction. The White Horse doesn’t need

Wikipedia to know the history. 1969:

A gnat hit trees – one fatality. 1971:

Two gnats collided – four men dead.

1987: a hawk crashed into a house –

No one died. Insurance paid. 2011:

Crash, death. Still under investigation.

Iraq War: a hundred and fourteen thousand, seven

Hundred and thirty one civilians dead. Afghan

Istan. And counting.

The White Horse doesn’t understand: he hasn’t

Taken sides in wars, or watched Top Gun, and

The sound of children crying makes the fossils

In him grind. When helicopters took folks up

There to glimpse him from the air, the whole

Thing took three minutes, from start to finish.

His making took an age. It began

With sea-things’ lives. He was born

Out of them, with the whole hill:

The Downs formed in the ocean swell.

Seas receded. Glaciers gouged

Out the Manger. Men emerged.

They saw his form long before

They cut it, looked from afar

And discerned his arching spine

On a windy landscape, strewn

With thistles. They paced him out

From ear to tail, etched his throat

With picks, dug his body deep.

And when pilots and passengers

Are asleep, the fossils resonate,

The eyeball widens. The White Horse peels

Himself from the hillside, looks down

On village, orchard, town, blesses

That child who helped to scour him

With her little trowel, arches himself.

His forelegs grapple with the turf, as though

He was some imago emerging. That

Eyeball revolves. And at once he is leaping,

Catching thermals like a peregrine,

Slicing through clouds, slipping out

Of our atmosphere, leaving the merest

Smear of chalk, cavorting with Arcturus,

Aligning the Pole-Star with his eye,

Seeking Betelgeuse in the armpit

Of Orion. Earth becomes invisible.

Each fossil becomes a star.

This poem was completed on the second day of the White Horse Country Show, in

the fields between Uffington and Fawler. Large crowds gathered on White Horse

Hill to watch the “Red Arrow” stunt fliers from the R.A.F., and helicopter flights

to view the White Horse from the air cost more than ten pounds a minute. “Gnats”

and “hawks” are the types of aeroplanes flown as Red Arrows.