Thursday, 6 June 2024

Map of Wiltshire's White Horses


I've re-drawn my Wiltshire White Horses map, because there were elements in the old one I wasn't happy with. And I needed to change the width to height ratio, to fit onto a tea towel (that one's in the pipeline...). So here's the new version, as a print. You can find it in my Etsy shop, linked here

There are currently eight white horses carved onto Wiltshire hillsides. Perhaps the best known are the Westbury Horse which you'll see if you're on the train from Salisbury to Bath; or the Cherhill one which you pass on the A4, the old coaching road and main route between London and Bristol. But there's also Alton Barnes in the Vale of Pewsey's crop circle and UFO heartland; and Devizes, Pewsey, Marlborough, Hackpen and Broadtown.

And it would be positively rude to miss out Uffington, by far the oldest of all the chalk figures, even though it's in Oxfordshire these days.

I've taken liberties with the topography, distances between and orientation of the horses, which don't all lie on southerly-sloping hills in real life. But at least they're more or less in the right relative positions. Vaguely...

There's also scenes from the area's past and present involving horse; the Kennet and Avon canal, with a horse preparing to haul a narrowboat; Wayland the smith shoeing a horse up on the Downs near Uffington; the Wadworth brewery dray which still delivers their beer around the Devies area.

2 comments:

  1. A good map that one.
    I have a photo of Pirate's father on a horse like that..I'm not sure what his title would be, but he cared for the horses in his regiment as his occupation at home was a waggoner..I think he was doing a similar job for the army in France.

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    1. I was just looking up the logistics of maintaining army horses, and it was quite something, wasn't it?

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