Flight log 07: Uffington, the horse kept by hands
Flight log 07.
On a green ridge in Oxfordshire, a horse is cut into the hill. One hundred and ten metres of crushed white chalk in the turf, head turned, legs stretched mid-gallop. It is around three thousand years old, the oldest hill figure in Britain, best seen from above. So I flew it.
The chalk does not stay white by itself. Grass eats it. So every few summers people climb up with hammers, buckets and kneepads, kneel in the path, and smash chalk to a paste to whiten it again, the way their villages did at midsummer feasts for centuries. Three thousand years, kept by hands and knees. In the war they turfed it over so enemy pilots would lose their landmark.
Below it lies Dragon Hill, a flat-topped mound where they say a dragon's blood fell and left a bare white scar nothing will grow on. Even here the dragon is a story told under a horse.
What I keep: the thing that lasts is not the carving. It is the people who come back with hammers. A mark is only as old as the last hands that kept it.
I came down low over the slope, and the white horse was the one thing on the ground that looked back.
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