White Horse Pilgrim

Three days away

D and I spent three days away on a trip. Rather than riding it was to be a sightseeing trip.

Rain poured down unrelenting through the first day. Our route passed through the New Forest. Rather than a timber wood this four hundred square mile expanse is a former medieval hunting forest of mixed open space and cover created by William the Conqueror. Shortly after the 1066 invasion William evicted the populace to create this waste, and folklore held the deaths here of two of his sons in hunting accidents to be just retribution.

The New Forest is home to its eponymous breed of pony. These native ponies live in small herds across the broad heath, just rounded up once a year for young-stock to be graded and sold. Selected stallions run with the mares. The ponies are used to people but generally keep a bit of space between themselves and visitors.

Then it was off to the village of Corfe Castle where I had booked two nights of accommodation. The weather cleared to reveal a fine view from our bedroom, including the remains of a castle destroyed during the Civil War in the 17th century.

The village included a station on a heritage railway so first we took a train ride to the sea coast five miles away. Everything on the line has been built from the ground up by voluntary effort, and it is now a major tourist attraction as well as relieving pressure on the crowded local roads.

The sea coast in this part of Britain is spectacular. I took this photo a few miles from the resort where the railway terminates. The sea has carved the chalk into tall cliffs interspersed by sheltered sandy bays.

Then it was back to explore the ruined castle. After a long siege the structure was irreparably wrecked by Oliver Cromwell's parliamentarian forces in order to deny it to hostile forces. For centuries the ruins have stood, silent and romantic.

Close up it's clear that Cromwell's men took some time (and a lot of gunpowder) to comprehensively smash the massive structure. Large parts of the keep have tumbled down, and the smaller towers and walls are broken too.

The castle appears even more ruined up there on top of the hill surrounded by fallen stone. The wind drove a short sharp rainstorm through whilst we explored, reinforcing a sense of raw bleakness in erstwhile that place of war.

The castle did give a fine view of a train departing far below, steam carrying in the damp breeze. That's a Pullman observation car behind the locomotive, and one with an unusual history. It was part of a tourist attraction in San Francisco from 1969 to 2007, when it was sold back to Britain to run once more.

On the way back we stopped at Clouds Hill, once the rural retreat of T E Lawrence. It's a quiet cottage without electricity or running water, and remains much as it was during the 1920s and '30s when Lawrence of Arabia stayed there. Admittedly it was a little difficult to imagine its introspective former owner with a bus tour group milling around.

Overall we had an interesting three days away, and a welcome change from the routine of home and work. However it was also a pleasure to return home to horses, cats and dogs.

Grazing upon memories

The sheep upon the hill-fort graze upon the memories of millennia.

For nearly three thousand years these concentric chalk ramparts have stood above the vale, in their organic simplicity surmounting rather than dominating. For a few centuries people lived here, then abandoned their home to shepherds and drovers. Invading Romans found the fort empty and disused, and passed by.

Here it is today. Abandoned to shepherds.....and to dreamers. Thomas Hardy knew this spot on the far north fringe of Wessex. Tolkien too was familiar with Uffington castle. It is Weathertop and stands not far from the Barrow Downs - the final photo in this post was taken in their midst. If you had seen the fort on a dark thundery night as I have, each blast of lightning silhouetting those ramparts, you too might have thought of Gandalf fighting off the Ringwraiths.

The sheep graze upon memories, and also upon the imaginations of dreamers both famous and humble.

Barrows and forts in racehorse country

Finally I have managed partially to negotiate the morass of incompatibility in which Internet Explorer 9 and Typepad flounder. At last it seems possible, sometimes, to post photos.

Yesterday Caroline visited again with her gelding Kevin. I arranged a ride down near Lambourn in racehorse country.

The hills are swept by the broad straights and curves of myriad racehorse gallops with their deep, springy and quite exclusive turf.

But the sparse sweep of the hills are dotted by Neolithic burial mounds and the concentric earthen ramparts of ancient forts. Indeed modern man calls these structures 'forts' however no-one alive knows what they were used for.

This landscape is a palimsest of journeys through the ages, most of them involving horses. Neolithic dwellers left the great drove route along the chalky crest. Romans added a few routes. Farmers from the Dark Ages onward added trackways. These all still exist, though most are now used differently.

Around Lambourn the gallops are the most obvious feature of the landscape after the hills themselves. Together with Newmarket, this is the core of the national racing industry. In each valley there is a racing stable, perhaps several, and the vast spaces needed to exercise the horses. Everywhere is grass - turf for exercise, grazing where fine calcium-bearing grass springs from the chalky soil, pastures for good hay.

The first photo shows the view as we rode uphill alongside an all-weather exercise track. This one must be at least a mile long, gently rising all the way.

The second photo shows a little-used trail, probably an old farm track, heading towards the concentric ramparts of Uffington Castle. The fort is huge but has quite a shallow profile viewed on the level.

The Neolithic Ridgeway runs from left to right immediately in front of the fort. This is the trail that we took, heading west with the wind on our faces and the sun on our left cheeks.

Here the Ridgeway is a narrow track of beaten chalk, quite unlike the wide turf way of the eastern sections that I know better.

There was a long distance walk in progress and a good hundred people passed us in the opposite direction. They were walking forty miles in the day, and a number did enquire in jest whether a horse may be hired.

We were walking on the right as there we found a wider grassy verge. It was natural, too, for Brena to walk on the right as she is a continental horse. I do have to remind her sometime that in this country we use the left side of the road.

Hedgerows are crowded with the frothy white of Cow Parsley, a snack beloved of horses (and, presumably, cattle). This is a lovely time of year. As T S Eliot wrote:

If you came this way in May time,
You would find the hedges
White again, in May,
With voluptuary sweetness.

So it is here in this season of rebirth. The land is white and green. Hedgerows are white with Hawthorn and Cow Parsley. The remainder is clad in green of various hues. It's a land of green and white dancing in the breeze.

The next stretch took us straight across a broad bright field, for here the farmer had not cleared the trail with herbicide. (They are supposed to do so across open fields such as this.) Here the old farm track has completely disappeared, now existing only in a legal sense and available to walkers, riders and cyclists. I trusted intuition to find the way, backed up by a map, and also found to my pleasure that Brena is happy for me to half-open a map whilst mounted.

It was an odd experience to ride across an open field such as this. Not much riding in southern England has this spacious character. Suddenly all references are far away. Plodding specks in a vast expanse, we could see for miles. It was like being on a small boat in the sea - freedom, exhilaration and loneliness all wrapped up together.

We were alone in a long, shallow valley where not a thing stirred - an agricultural wilderness. It was a little eerie, and I thought of the people and horses that must once have laboured here. What a bustling place this must once have been, in certain seasons anyway.

After the expanse of grass, we turned east again towards our parking place. There was one final ridge to climb, and here we "opened the taps". We must have cantered for the best part of a mile, enough to tire both horses.

A little experimentation showed me a good position with quite a forward seat, all my weight in the stirrups, giving Brena the freedom that she needed to use her body most efficiently. I had been looking forward to a good long canter for just this reason.

Then it was just a short mile's walk downhill to our vehicles, parked on a grassy square surrounded by gallops and the white railings peculiar to racing establishments.

The horses got the chance to graze on tethers, appreciating grass rich after an overnight rain storm. Indeed a good dousing has rejuvenated turf and crops alike.

Such are the rides that we enjoy in a landscape that inspired Tolkien's Barrow Downs.

Long rays and windows

Off in the evening, sun on my back, breeze on my face.

It all seems so stereotypical: work, ride, sleep.

Work, ride, sleep every day this week.

But it seems like a good life nonetheless. I am not complaining about spending fifteen hours a week riding. Nor does Doru seem to mind.

Off we go into a great wide waving sea of green, an ocean of vegetation that he knows to be edible. I love to look at the view, and he appreciates the opportunity to eat whatever grows around his feet. Just pause and two fellow travellers are happy.

We have achieved symbiosis.

The eared barley is bright, almost metallic in the low rays, from a distance hard like illuminated shale on a mountain flank.

But even the thought of sunlit rock is nostalgic, for once I dwelt in the high mountains and travelled in places bare yet beautiful.

This flowing blanket of living crop brings me joy also. Here is a landscape ancient yet productive, moulded by human activity but neither crowded nor terribly spoiled. The landscape is clean, then, and its spirit remains alive, unquenched.

Besides, here are wheat and barley, and I do like bread and beer. The simpler things are best: bread and cheese, ale and roast meat.

Oh for a shepherd and his flock. I yearn for the traditional shepherd with his hut and cauldron, cheeses hanging outside. Good were the days when one could ride out to meet such a man at his camp, share a shot or two of good strong brandy, and buy a thick wedge of fresh flavoursome cheese. Once we bought a lamb to cook, securing the creature in a rucksack, but he chewed a hole.

The old lane, quiet now, still opens a window across the plain. I stopped and gazed, as if watching from the balcony of a delightfully located cottage. Doru was happy, for there grew that particular type of grass with thick rank blades that looks so unappetising yet is considered a delicacy by horses. So I feasted my eyes, and he feasted altogether more literally.

This place is a gift for writers and artists, including of course poets and phtographers. Thomas Hardy I thought of, gazing out across the very marches of Wessex, and - for some strange reason - Tolstoy too. It's a gift for me too, for here I might empty my mind and free it for meditation that requires welcome and complete liberation from a jumble of stray thoughts and intellectual strivings.

Sea of grass

I've heard tell of the untouched places, where the grass stretches as far as the eye can see and reaches up to the horses' bellies.

I've seen a painting of the steppes somewhere by the Don river, where the whole grassy land was carpeted with bright flowers.

I wonder about those places. How the heart must have leapt upon encountering their wild spacious beauty. What must it have felt like to gaze from horizon to lonely horizon across such a sea of grass?

I am the passer when up-eared hares
Stirred as they eat
The new-sprung wheat,
Their munch resume
As if they thought: "He is one for whom
Nobody cares."

So Thomas Hardy wrote in I am the One. Hardy who imagined Wessex and described great brooding Egdon Heath. Yet I do not imagine a melancholy land that drags fate-harnessed mortals each to his or her allotted doom. Why should I, for now I am in the business of casting down the weighty cloak of darkness.

Hardy set this joyous green rolling downland dragging Jude the Obscure to his pointless doom. Perhaps he and I disagree? But it was the inhabitants that pushed unlucky Jude onward and downward, and I am wary of those people.

I hear above: "We stars must lend
No fierce regard
To his gaze, so hard
Bent on us thus, -
Must scathe him not. He is one with us
Beginning and end."

Our "sea of grass" near to the barn is small and few are the flowers. It's a pool or backwater of grass, for truly this isn't a sea. Yet how wonderfully myriad stalks and leaves sway and swirl in the breeze. It lifts the spirits just to walk or ride through such spot, and I am sorely tempted to stop, dismount and lay down whilst Doru grazes.

As with the stars, we are one with the meadows and with the breeze that stirs the grass. So perhaps in spirit we may ride along a grassy valley, climb a low hill thick with wild flowers and, reaching the summit, gaze across the silvery loops of a great river? May I dismount there and rest, my horse munching eagerly as I gaze to the far hazy horizon? In truth that seems like a vision of heaven.

Bones of the hill transcendent

The fluid form of the White Horse flows across the rich sward like a placid stream.

At this proximity the fulness of the animal's form is unclear. Wandering the head and body and limbs, one is like a blind person exploring an object by feel. There is no close vantage point from which one may appreciate the wholeness of the White Horse, but only from the plains that sweep away from the sinuous foot of the chalk scarp.

Here is the top of the head, the branch climbing leftward an ear. Some steps to the right reveal the eye. Tracing the creature's layout one can but wonder at the vision of the makers. This is no pattern traced upon a flat canvas, but a design spread across a broad three dimensional surface this mimicking the rounded muscularity of a living horse.

The White Horse is massive and yet delicate, the narrow branches only a foot or two wide. The design is huge, but details meander at a human scale.

Inventive ones made the White Horse millennia ago, and others through the ages have cherished this symbol of speed and grace and civilisation. Neither did new religion despise this horse, nor modern people ignore the largest relic of neolithic creativity.

Throughout these thousands of years people have been involved in its upkeep. This is no pyramid made eons ago to stand mute amongst those ignorant of its purpose. It contains no buried treasure to dig up. There is no building stone to plunder. The value of the White Horse is in the idea of such a thing. Hence it has been conserved.

The horse has been connected with human life for perhaps the entire duration of the White Horse's existance. Provider of transport, conveyer of status, hauler of plough, steed of warrior, mount of jockey - many are the links between two types of creature. Thus perhaps one commemorated the other, and others maintained the memorial for the link - though changing - never once was broken. Now perhaps we need the horse materially less than ever before for the survival of our species, yet we seem to respect our equine neighbours more than ever. Thus has the relationship grown.

So perhaps this hillside is as meaningful as the archaeological site in the Ukraine where evidence was found of humankind's first domestication of the horse? As expressive too as the few places such as wildest Mongolia where ancient horsemanship is practiced still?

Scouring of the White Horse

This weekend the White Horse of Uffington was scoured. This is a time when the neolithic chalk figure is cleaned, weeds being removed and fresh chalk added.

It's a tradition extending back to the Neolithic age, given that the chalk figure is some three to four thousand years old, and that such chalk figures will vanish within a couple of decades without maintenance.

In Victorial times the scouring became a time of revelry, when the local people cleaned the White Horse, drank copiously and enjoyed games and revelry. That was too much for the puritans and prudes, hence the White Horse became a municipal responsibility.

Now its maintenance is overseen by a charity, and public involvement is again the norm. But now the scouring is a family activity and people pay for the privilege of taking part.

The "work" involves chiefly breaking small lumps of chalk that have been dumped onto the surface of the figure using a steel mallet, creating a hard skin from which the rain runs. Nor will frost crack this hard layer of packed chalk. But it is labour intensive work, breaking rocks inch by painstaking inch to do the job properly. Isn't it curious how breaking rock was once for felons, but now is a labour of love to maintain a treasure?

The view was splendid on this sunny day, and it was warm low down to the ground out of the stiff breeze.

Standing up, one felt the cool and power of the wind in this exposed place, a location of primitive grandeur. White Horse Hill is not tall as hills go, and yet it feels lofty, impressive, stately. It is a hill with attitude, and perhaps that is why unknown distant ancestors chose to carve the figure of a running horse onto this primeval turf?

Perhaps they wanted to create a timeless memorial, a cult object, an artefact imbued with beauty and grace. If so then they succeeded.

I admired the people labouring to repair the White Horse, fellow travellers who care about the signs left by those who walked these hills thousands of years ago.

I love the way in which a tradition millennia old is being perpetuated willingly, and the young inducted into it.

Here are a people who care about the ancient places and things of their realm, and in this there is hope. For those who know and value the past have some of the knowledge necessary to create a civilised and meaningful future.

Meanwhile White Horse Hill stands bearing its majestic figure, and it is an integral part of England, yet older than the English. The Romans adopted the flowing beast, the Saxons, the Vikings (of whom the Normans were a branch), and those who followed.

Now the White Horse is a part of the fabric of this land, which we do not own but of which we are custodians. The chalk beast is a symbol of timelessness, and of human attachment to the land upon which we live and depend, to which the more perceptive are linked spiritially as well as physically.

Ride that was supposed to be

Today L and I met for a ride across the chalk hills.

After the glorious weather of the previous weekend, anticlimax was to be expected.

And indeed the inevitable happened, rain driven hard across the land by a strong wind off the sea.

In this drear weather I caught a wet Doru and loaded him into the trailer. He seemed keen to get into the dry. My truck was prepared already with saddle, bridle, raincoat, feed and all the other things that I might need. The raincoat especially. What would one do without a long Australian stockman's coat, that great and much valued antipodean contribution to the comfort of riders?

I did not take my camera, seeing no point to getting it soaked. For what motive should a third camera die in as many years? Not for the humble task of recording grey rain-soaked hills, surely. So these are the photos of the ride that we hoped for but did not realise.

Then I drove to Sparsholt Firs, along sodden roads where rainwater collected in the dips for truck and trailer to thunder through casting spray into the air like a small boat in a rough sea. On the ridge we waited, my horse and I, dancing thorn bushes granting scant cover against horizontal driving rain. We waited, and I learned by text message that L was held up in a traffic jam. But finally she arrived and we prepared our beasts.

Mercifully the wind dropped a little and the leaden clouds withheld their damp burden. Thus temporarily blessed we set off, and our horses were keen.

Quiet were the trails, for the weather had detered all but the hardiest. The great sweep of Childrey Warren lay tantalising below, awaiting a sunbeam to illuminate its vast swathe of historic grassland. But that must wait for another day.

Then south along narrow lanes of deep sward crowded between milky cow-parsley and hawthorn. Wonderful lanes, old and very English, but quiet without the shepherd and his flock, the boy driving cattle, the carter and his pair drawing a creaking wain, the milkmaid, the tinker, the gypsy.

This is the far fringe of Thomas Hardy's Wessex. Jude wandered here, and more than just he. Now it is my turn, and I am happier than Jude and luckier. Further explorations are warranted, and in fairer weather. More journeys must be made to experience the atmosphere, the sense of place, the uniqueness of these hills where verdant meets bleak. I am looking forward to the coming summer.

Returning to our parked vehicles, Doru practically rushed into the trailer seeking shelter and hay. And that from a horse which, at Easter, was receiving training to persuade him to set foot in a trailer! It was not a moment too soon, for the deluge gained fresh vigour and beat down mercilessly as I lifted the ramp. There was nothing to do but return to the barn.

An hour later fickle bright sun flooded the wet landscape. By that point I was refreshed with a hot meal inside me and a mug of clear golden cider too. It had been a good day, a real authentic day, a day when two riders could prove that they also are intrepid and do not baulk at a little rain.

There are still two days free from work to enjoy, and the weather is forecast to improve.