The Flight of the White Horse
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Transcript of The Flight of the White Horse
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.