The Chalk Horse

It's fair to say my first blog, waylaid, set the blogging world afire. Even now, during some red-hot periods, I get up to two comments per half-year. I have to say it's gratifying, especially since I spend so long searching for, researching, and keying in my favourite poems, carefully crafting the tightest emotional fit between my audience and the best of the poetic imagination of the past couple of centuries.  

Such a fever-pitched response deserves reward. So for those who made waylaid great, here is the Chalk Horse.  

So. I am quite the Anglophile, and I sometimes think what I phile most dearly of all is the chalk horses. I've loved them forever – ever since some fantastic BBC (English, anyway) horsey children's drama (the Something Mare? Or was it an adaptation of Black Beauty? It doesn't google), the climax of which was numerous spunky pony clubbers on fiesty little Welsh ponies such as I was very desirous of owning at the age of eight galloping over the top of the Uffington white horse. On the other hand, this could have been a dream I had at the age of eight.

I finally saw most of the chalk horses in 2000 when I was staying in Bristol and my Welsh friend Duey and I went on an ancient pagan places mini-break. We went to the Uffington chalk horse in Oxfordshire, to a few of the other conterfeits nearby in Wiltshire – the funny thing about Uffington is that it inspired an 18th century craze in scraping out chalk horses on convenient hillsides – to Avebury (pictured – Avebury being a town encircled by a very mysterious and ancient stone …um… circle. We stayed in a funny b&b that was actually just a council house, not pictured) and to Stonehenge.

Obviously, of that lot, it's the Uffington chalk horse that I dig the most. It looks Matisse painted it. It was incredibly freezing at the top of the hill and I fell over. Apparently it's the only real pre-historic horse – late Bronze Age – 1000BC or so. It's marvellous and breathtaking and huge in a way that being at ground level mocks. To give you an idea, I've cannily placed this border collie…

…next to the eye of the horse to show, in scale, just how insubstantial the bits are. (Border collie is not model's own.) On approach, you drive around in circles as you struggle to view it, to find that vantage point that will do for being airborne. Which in turn, of course, demonstrates how amazing it is that some stone age people managed to intuit that one day this will look fricken fantantasic on Google Earth. And it shows the faith and tenacity of those communities that for three millenium kept those delicate lines scoured – every seven years, they say. I am reading a scholarly article about it. It lapsed for a century or so quite recently, but the horse managed define itself sufficiently to be readable, mappable and revivable. I do love that horse. What does it mean?

We finally came up upon Stonehenge in the dark, after I'd spent about an hour singing the few lines I knew of what I believed to be Peter Gabrielle's "Climbing up on Salisbury Hill", because we were driving over Salisbury plain, and which a couple of years later I realised is actually "Climbing up on Solsbury Hill", Solsbury Hill being near Bath. Apparently quite a lot of people make this mistake.

 When I first saw it I burst into tears. As I remember, this later led to a bit of an argument, as I tried to explain why it was that Stonehenge, which is really just an overblown table-setting type of relic, should make me burst into tears while seeing Anchor Wat in Cambodia, which is about a gazillion times more stunning and impressive, didn't. (Though obviously the final scene of In the Mood for Love when Tony Leung tells his secret love for Maggie Cheung to a hole in the Anchor Wat wall and then stuffs it with straw had me in floods of tears.) I thought this was acceptable because there is always a difference between one's own (potential) heritage and other peoples', but Duey just thought it was vaguely racist and dumb. Who was right?

G K Chesterton wrote a very long and Christinay poem called The Ballad of the White Horse. (See some more managable Chesterton ballads here.)