“White horse hill” , this is the name of the mysterious hill located near Uffington , a small town in southern England , on which someone decided to create a huge geoglyph depicting a stylized horse species in ancient times. This breathtaking work, called “Uffington horse”, was made by digging furrows more than a meter deep in the ground, until the white layer of chalk, that is the material that characterizes the hill itself, appears. For centuries, the legend of the place has said that the figure is actually the portrait of the famous dragon killed by St. George (II – III century AD), right on the nearby hill called Dragon Hill. On the other hand, the most ancient legend says that the figure is a representation of the Celtic goddess Epona, not in a human form but in a horse form, who was worshiped for her fertility, healing and death powers.
The last theory finally comes from the archaeologist Joshua Pollard of the University of Southampton, who believes that the symbol may represent a mythical horse pulling the sun from the sky. Mr. Pollard states that the body of the animal is positioned as if it were running up a slope from Dragon Hill, across a hill, a mound, in the direction of Uffington Castle, a residence dating back to the Iron Age. Discover now all our trips, tours, holidays and horse trekking in Great Britain. Mr. Pollard states that “If you follows the position and the movement of the horse, it corresponds to the arc of the sun during the winter solstice”, and added that the sun is pulled across the sky by a horse or by a chariot with several horses, and carried overnight by a boat in the Indo-European mythology.
The gigantic geoglyph, up to 114 meters long and 34 meters high, has been subjected to scrupulous analyzes over the years, which have confirmed that it is the work of people who lived there during the Bronze Age , more than 3000 years ago. On that note, it seems that no researcher has yet been able to understand which ancient people created this great work, not even the reason, but the Uffington horse, for some strange reason, was made to be fully visible only from above…
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Originally from the Dutch province of Friesland (from which it takes its name), the Friesian horse belongs to one of the oldest breeds in Europe, so much so that it is supposed to have existed for over 3000 years. The Friesian horse was already known to the ancient Romans and, during the Middle Ages, it […]
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