White Horse 3 - Alton Barnes

Went to see my favourite one, at Alton Barnes in Wiltshire, when on our way to Portsmouth to get the boat to France. Guess what, it was raining again.....

This horse was created by a Mr Robert Pile in 1812. Apparently Mr Pile paid twenty pounds to a journeyman painter, John Thorne, also known as Jack the Painter, to design the white horse and have the work of cutting it carried out.   But before the work was finished Thorne took off with the money, and Mr Pile was left to pay out again........

We went to the nearby village of Alton Prior to find the big stone which has a carving of the horse on it, the lichen is starting to take over though.....

There is a tradition of lighting the white horses to mark special occasions, and in recent times the horse has been lit with candles such as on 30th June 2012, marking its 200th anniversary. Which looked very cool.....(photo courtesy of Terry Waldron)

And here's a pic taken from the air by those Last Refuge people again......on a sunny day!

White Horse Two......Kilburn

I have always been fascinated by the white chalk horse figures on UK hillsides, and I keep sying I must go and visit them all. We have managed to see a few of them including the very unusual Uffington White Horse a few years ago, but it's not so easy when you don't live in the country.

But now we do, and the Wiltshire ones aren't far away at all, so we really must get on with it. However, as we were up in Yorkshire this weekend visiting friends we decided to go and check out the only White Horse in the north of England, at Kilburn, near Thirsk.

The Kilburn White Horse was cut in 1857, apparently by a local schoolteacher and his pupils and on a clear day can be seen from as far away as Leeds. Unfortunately for us, as it is often grim ooop north, we got wind and rain and fog - definitely not a clear day :-/

So, pictures on the web show me that the horse looks like this when viewed from the village:

When we got there, we could barely make out the side of the hill.

We  followed the signs to the car park below the horse, from where again the good old internet shows me you can see most of it:

I, however, only managed to get this less than edifying picture:

Ah well, at least we found it. Maybe we'll go back sometime when the weather is better! In the meantime, here is an aerial view of the horse by those brilliant photographers at Last Refuge

.....taken on a sunny day!

For more about the white chalk horses in the UK, I can recommend this site.

White Horse One - Uffington

When we were in the UK recently we went to see the Uffington White horse. It's the oldest of the white chalk figures in England, probably dating from the Bronze Age. You can't really get a decent photo of it from the ground unfortunately, not even from a distance.

We went to the top of the hill and got some shots of its head, it's a very strange shaped horse!

The only way to see it properly is from the air as it's on a very shallow slope, perhaps it was originally cut there to be seen only by the gods......

This shot is from an interesting site about the chalk horses in the UK, here's the link