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Uffington White Horse

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evilsprout

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Uffington "Horse" (in FT81)

Just having a flick through FT81, and came across the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire (on p18), and its dating of 1,400-600 BC.

It also mentions that it may be a cat rather than a horse... (keen readers of my crypto-threads will know where this one's going)... evidence of ancient ABC action/cat worship?

What does everyone else think?

(here's a scan if anyone wants a look - http://www.pmella.freeserve.co.uk/uffington.jpg)
 
Even though the earliest antiquarians were way off in their
dating - they said it was a memorial to a victory of King Alfred - the
identification as a horse has not usually been questioned.

It is so abstract and disjointed, it could well be a moggie,
especially if the two little lines are taken for whiskers. Or do
they represent the jaw bones of a horse?

It has also been subject to rescouring over the years, but I
would tend to think it has not been willfully distorted.

No, the traditional identification is based on representations
seen on coins which are equally abstract. There does seem to
have been an ancient horse fetish and one and a half miles
away there is the Wayland's Smithy barrow, where a mythic
invisible figure would reshoe horses for a coin left in offering.

Making a case for the moggie is going to need a trawl through
all the other images and effigies. But go for it, academic traditions
can be built on very little except unquestioned authorities. ;)
 
Don't know where I've got this idea from, but isn't it thought that the 'Horse' is in fact some sort of dragon?

I'm pretty obsessed with felines, and had a print of the 'Horse' on the wall for some years, but I must admit I never looked at it and thought 'Bugger me, that looks like a cat!'

Besides - a WHITE cat?
 
Moggie!

It's a cat! I'm baffled as to how anyone could ever think otherwise.
Clearly, people way-back-when thought cats were great and decided to spend God-knows-how-long carving one onto a hill.
The mystery is "why?" Cat worship ala ancient Egypt?
 
Alternative suggestions:
fox, otter, pine marten, stoat, weasel, polecat, red squirrel, grey squirrel, common lizard or a newt of somekind?

-Justin.
 
a horse is a horse, of course, of course... :D

It looks like a galloping horse to me - sorry, but I can't just see a cat in it.

And as for

Cat worship ala ancient Egypt?
Click to expand...

Those "cats" are actually mongoose, worshipped for their ability
to kill snakes!

Sorry, I'm not convinced .
 
Those "cats" are actually mongoose, worshipped for their ability to kill snakes!
Click to expand...

Well- I never heard the like!

Is it just me, or is the presence of cats in ancient Egypt pretty well universally accepted? Or is this some post 'Cats + Dogs' conspiracy theory?

'Ah well you see, in the C18th & 19th, cats and their human stooges in archeaology planted thousands of mummified cats in Egypt. (Also lots of statues of Sekhmet etc) This was followed by a succesful marketing campaign which made the Victorians fascinated by every detail of ancient Egyptian life. Is it purely a coincidence that it is during the Victorian period that cats really made it as pets, with the first cat shows, the first campaigns against ill treatment, and feline propaganda implying that no nursery was complete without a kitten'

[Louis Wain knew the truth, and tried to encode it in his paintings, but was driven mad to silence him!]
 
Well it looks like I set the cat among the... erm, horses... with that post! To be honest it's a very stylised image that could be any quadropedal animal. If you want to see a cat it's a cat (especially round the whiskers), but could be anything.
 
...after a bit of in depth research (googling) I must amend my statement - apparently both mongoose and cats were held sacred in Egypt, and mummies of both plus other animals exist.

Still looks like a horse to me though...
 
I thought it was pretty much agreed that it was a representation of the Celtic horse goddess Epona. I'm not sure that there would have even been domesticated cats in Britain 2500 years ago, although I suppose there would have been wild ones (don't flame me too much on this- the history of the domestic cat is not one of my enduring fascinations so I could be wrong) around the place. The other thing is that hillsides erode and change and that 2500 years is a long time- the design could have been a lot more accurate when it was first carved and just been lost over the years.
 
My latest issue of ARCHAEOLOGY (from the Arch. Inst. of America) had a nice little article on the "Horse"*. Here's a link to the abstract (sorry full article not on www)

http://www.archaeology.org/cgi-bin/site.pl?page=0109/abstracts/horse

One thing not in the abstract is that the landscape had been extensively altered in "prehistoric times" (one educated possibility says 700 B.C.), so that from certain vantage points the "Horse"* is not visible. Leading some from Oxford to think it might have been used in religious/kingship rituals by the Celts then living there.


*"Horse" they insist on calling it (first ID'ed as such writing in 849 A.D.)-- I take no sides on that debate. I think it's like a cloud - you see what you see. it's a big Rorschach test at this point and (as long as no one sees a Monkey Man --- What are you crazy?) no point in getting worked up about it
 
Well, I've always thought that if you turn it upside down, it looks like an Ichthyosaur (Dinosaue fish) !!
 
It's like other contemporary art. This is a not very good example I think?

so.....

  • all horse
  • all something else
  • mixed and we don't pick up on the differences that were obvious to the people at the time
and also

  • someone couldn't draw
  • it's meant to be ambiguous
:)
 
PeteByrdie said:
Sinuous build, longish neck, roundish head with sticky out muzzle. It's a weasel. They just didn't get time to carve out the woodpecker underneath it.
Click to expand...


Post of the Week mate! :D
 
Bad Bungle said:
The White Horse is barely pre-Victorian, the Uffington Greyhound is 3000 years old.
Possibly.
Click to expand...

There's only one chalk figure at Uffington as far as I know & it's certainly known as a horse..
 
Fluttermoth said:
Oh, no, not this again! :rollingw:

I've been around horses and sighthounds all my life, and the Uffington figure is a horse; the proportions and angles are all wrong for a dog!
Click to expand...

Indeed. These iron-age English coins depict horses with not dissimilar disarticulated limbs.
They are definitely horses though.

coins.jpg
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
Indeed. These iron-age English coins depict horses with not dissimilar disarticulated limbs.
They are definitely horses though.

View attachment 27879
Click to expand...

Very nice coins. I still like the idea of a greyhound, but the point is that it is difficult to know exactly what the original Uffington cutting looked like 3000 years ago. As English Heritage says:
"Once every seven years from at least 1677 until the late 18th century a midsummer ‘scouring festival’ was held, during which local people cleaned the chalk outline of the horse and enjoyed a celebratory feast within the hillfort.
The shape of the horse has changed over the centuries. The present outline may be only a part of the original: aerial photography shows that a larger, more conventional shape of a horse lies beneath. The loss of shape has been caused by slippage of the top soil and by repeated recutting. The head currently has a prominent ‘eye’, and tusk-like ‘beak’ at its mouth".

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk...n-castle-white-horse-and-dragon-hill/history/
 
Bad Bungle said:
Very nice coins. I still like the idea of a greyhound, but the point is that it is difficult to know exactly what the original Uffington cutting looked like 3000 years ago. As English Heritage says:
"Once every seven years from at least 1677 until the late 18th century a midsummer ‘scouring festival’ was held, during which local people cleaned the chalk outline of the horse and enjoyed a celebratory feast within the hillfort.
The shape of the horse has changed over the centuries. The present outline may be only a part of the original: aerial photography shows that a larger, more conventional shape of a horse lies beneath. The loss of shape has been caused by slippage of the top soil and by repeated recutting. The head currently has a prominent ‘eye’, and tusk-like ‘beak’ at its mouth".

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk...n-castle-white-horse-and-dragon-hill/history/
Click to expand...

Good point.
If you look at how the horse's head is depicted on those ancient coins, it's a sort of elongated triangle:

horse1.JPG

Which makes me wonder if the weird-looking "whiskers" emerging from the Uffington horse's mouth area were originally part of a more horse-like elongated head:

horse2.JPG
 
Documentary featuring the late great David Bedford's Song of the White Horse symphony.

A truly haunting and inventive (check out the use of helium!) piece of music and some great film of the horse, Weyland's Smithy and the remarkable "blowing stone" too.

The symphony starts at 24:24, but the preamble is fascinating.

 
This featured on Mystic Britain, Smithsonian Ch earlier. One thing I hadn't realised - situated where it is, it's virtually impossible to view it's entirety from ground level. It's on the crest of an undulating ridge on the highest hill in the area. You can see parts of it but to see the whole thing showing the beautiful design implying movement, it has to be viewed from above.

It was turfed over during WWll to stop it being used as a signpost by the Luftwaffe. The archeologist given the task of reinstating it in 1951 illicitly dug a trench to examine how it was constructed. He found the design was not just topsoil scraped off to reveal chalk underneath but consisted of trenches a meter deep, filled with chalk.

The idealised running horse design is quite a long way from the horses around at the time which would've been much more stocky, more like Dartmoor ponies.

A recent sample of the deeper rock fill dated it's construction between 1300 - 600 BC.

It's remarkable that hundreds of generations have thought it worth spending the time preserving even though no-one knows what it's about. Nowadays volunteers do it yearly, picking out grass growing in the formation then painting with a chalk solution. It takes several weeks.
 
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