Cherhill White Horse

The Cherhill White Horse is a Geoglyph on the Cherhill in Wiltshire, England. It dates from the late 18th century and is the third oldest of such figures in the UK. The figure is also called the Oldbury White Horse.

Location

It is located on a steep slope towards the north-east below the remains of Oldbury Castle.

In the vicinity of the horse is a Lansdowne monument called the Obelisk. This is a 38 -meter stone structure, which in 1845 by Henry Petty - FitzMaurice, 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne was built to remember his ancestors Sir William Petty.

Inspiration

The Cherhill horse was probably inspired by the first of such horse, which is located at Westbury in Wiltshire and has just been restored only. The origins of the Westbury White Horse are somewhat puzzling. Unlike the Uffington White Horse in Berkshire, has been proven to come from the Bronze Age, we find the earliest evidence for the Westbury White Horse in a paper by Francis Wise ( 1742). The first Wiltshire horse probably remembers the victory of Alfred the Great, Guthrum and the Danes at the Battle of Ethandun in 878 states Another theory is that it only in the early 18th century as proof of loyalty to the new royal house, the House of Hanover arose because the white horse is the heraldic symbol of the house of Hanover.

History

The figure in Cherhill was originally carved in 1780 by Dr. Christopher Alsop of Calne, by removing the peat layer to allow occur the chalk layer to light. The original size was 50 meters by 67 meters. Dr. Alsop was Guild Steward of the Borough of Calne and was the mad doctor ( German: the crazy doctor ) called. It is reported that he had guided the creation of the horse from a distance and thereby gave the instructions with a megaphone.

Since 1780, the horse has been revised several times. 1935 was provided with a mixture of chalk and cement and cleaned in 1994. A basic restoration took place in 2002. It was fitted with 160 tonnes of new chalk and a wrapper is to ensure the stability of the chalk.

In the 19th century, the horse had a glass eye, formed from bottles that had been stuck to the bottom upwards into the earth. The bottles stammtem from Farmer Angell and his wife, but they were probably stolen from the late 19th century as a souvenir. In the 1970s, the horse was again an eye of glass that was lost, however. The eye is now composed of stones and cement and protrudes from the chalk surface.