Chalking the Uffington White Horse — Epoche A2
White Horse Hill, Oxfordshire How do you keep a drawing on a hillside for three thousand years? On Saturday I found out, on my knees. The Uffington White Horse is cut into a chalk hilltop: a horse in a few long white lines, 110 metres nose to tail, made in the Bronze Age. First surprise: up there you cannot see it. Beside it, only white trenches curve through the grass. The whole horse appears from the valley below, or from the air. Second surprise: the horse needs people. Grass grows in from the edges, and rain greys the chalk. Left alone, the figure would close over and disappear in twenty or thirty years. So it is 'scoured': on chalking days volunteers kneel along the lines, break lumps of fresh chalk with hammers, and pound the surface white again, patch by patch. Saturday was a chalking day. A National Trust steward gave me a kneeling pad, a hammer and a bucket, and for an hour I crushed chalk like cracking sugar. An hour whitens about as much horse as a bath towel would cover. Around me, thirty people knelt, hammered, chatted. Driving home, we stopped in the valley and looked back. There it was on the green hill, sharp and white, looking freshly drawn. It was. It has to be — or there would be nothing on the hill at all.