28 years ago, in 1981, mum and dad were slumming it around Europe together. One day they set out enthusiastically in order to go and see the white horse. It hadn't occurred to them until they arrived at the site that a chalk drawing under several feet of snow would be invisible. They then tried to go and see Wayland's smithy to make up for the horse, but mum gave up in disgust after the first half k or so, once her boots had become caked in mud and doubled in weight. So - dad had once seen Wayland's smithy, and none of the three of us had ever seen the horse. We had high hopes as we drove along this morning, following the brown signs that pointed to the viewing spot.
I began to get edgy as we approached Somerset, along English backwater roads - there was a thick white fog beginning to settle on the hills above us. By the time we arrived at the start of the walk and paid the parking machine, the world seemed to have shrunk to about 50 metres in diameter. We opened the creaky gate into paddocks full of ghostly sheep, and set out along the trodden-down grass footpath that disappeared into the mist.
There was only one other man there when we arrived, and he set out in a different direction across the fields. I watched his shape become faded and indistinct, and then he disappeared into the mist. Once we passed the gate, we could have been walking through neolithic England for all we could tell from our surroundings. It was just us and the sheep, and what we hoped was the right footpath.
On we went, through another gate and further hilly paddocks. We passed a couple looking for a lost beanie, and then they too were swallowed up by the sheep-filled fog. Our footpath wandered around the spur of a hill, and then quite suddenly the ground was falling away incredibly steeply on our left, into a gully that seemed bottomless and full of grey mist. Apparently during summer the locals hold "cheese races" here. No, really - they're ever bit as silly as they sound. Someone rolls a wheel of cheese down this hellishly steep valley-side, and people throw themselves after it to try be the first to catch the cheese. They start out by running, but pretty soon everyone's rolling and falling over each other, bruising sides and breaking limbs. Is it any surprise that in the history of cheese-racing, the cheese has never been caught? This strikes me as one of the best demonstrations of why tradition ain't always a thing worth keeping.
Anyway, we rounded the top of the slope very cautiously, and came through a final gate, and suddenly - aha! Bold white lines at our feet where the grass and topsoil had been cut back from the chalk of the hill underneath. We were standing above the horse, right up close. The fog had lifted just far enough that we could make out the entirety of the horse when we stood at its middle, although with the distorted perspective it took us some time to figure out which end was its head. However, once I realised I was looking at its eye, suddenly the design "clicked".
I walked from the horse's nose right down to the tip of its tail, trying to figure out how anyone could carve something so precisely without the help of computers and satellites. Because the thing about these sinuous lines cut into the hill is that from the surrounding countryside, they resolve into the foreshortened shape of an animal that looks part-horse, part-dragon. The horse was made to be seen from a distance; its lines don't make quite so much sense up-close. The cuttings curl around a bunch of low hummocks; you can't even *see* the entirety of the horse when you're standing at the site. I was keen to see the design from the hills opposite, but that depended on the weather.
The fog still seemed very thick to me, but dad was adamant that it was beginning to lift as the sun came further up. We decided we'd put off trying the horse's lookout until later in the day, when the fog would have had the best chance to disappear.
We left the horse, and it ebbed silently into the greyness as we walked away. It was a slightly sinister feeling to turn one's back on something so ancient and obviously powerful - I got to wondering if those lines would still be there if nobody but the sheep stuck around to watch them. The valley the horse lies above is sometimes called "the manger", because of a local legend that says on moonless nights the horse wanders down the hillside to graze. I got the half-delighted creeps.
Further up the next hillside is an old hill-fort called Uffington castle. It's also neolithic, so don't be fooled by its name - all that remains is the circle of the fortification's earth wall and the deep ditch surrounding that. As we walked, groups of sheep broke away from their flock and followed us a few feet behind. Each time we turned around they'd freeze and look shifty, but if we carried on a little further there'd be faint "baaaa"s behind us and the little squelches of hooves on muddy grass. One group of sheep charged down the ditch and pelted right up the other side behind dad, baaaing victoriously once they reached the top of the wall. They lost interest in us after a while, and joined the flock of sheep grazing in the centre of the fort.
We walked back in the direction we'd come - and then up to a path leading along the ridge behind the horse and the hill fort. This was the way to Wayland's smithy, an ancient barrow or passage tomb (like Newgrange, only long and thin). The path had turned to sticky, caking mud, but mum was quite happy - she tells me it wasn't a patch on the thick mud of the first time she visited. There was a very old hedge growing on either side of the path - I'd say this was one of the few hedgerows that wasn't torn up when modern ploughing equipment became popular in England. It wasn't until farmers had demolished a lot of them that people realised hedgerows were important ecosystems for little birds and animals.
The path went rather a long way with empty fields on either side, and was above the level of the mist. Not long after we'd found the start of it, a big strung-out group of pairs of schoolchildren passed us with maps, asking us in Harry-Potter-esque accents if this was the way to the horse. I think they were in some orienteering challenge; the front few pairs were running as hard as they could through the mud in order to get somewhere, /anywhere/ first, and further down the line the boys were leaping from behind piles of soiled hay and ambushing each other with manure-pats. I overheard one redheaded boy say "blimey, there's supposed to be a CASTLE around here somewhere - we can't possibly miss that!"
After a few kilometres we reached a ramshackle little gate and a path beyond, that led to a circle of trees in the middle of a field. And in the circle... there was the dolmen, with the earth built up behind it. Surrounded by flat ground carpeted with red leaves. For those of you who had really boring bedtime stories, or didn't grow up reading Susan Cooper's books, or "Puck of Pook's Hill"... Wayland is the mythical blacksmith who could shoe any horse. His legends are older (I think) than some forms of the King Arthur legend, and he's in the same sort of vein as Herne the Hunter - wild and potentially dangerous beings who sometimes offer help to humans, but who are not at all obliged to. The legend associated with the barrow at Uffington is that some nights, Wayland would manifest there. If you left your horse tethered to the entrance stone, and left the smith the right amount of gold... you could return in the morning to find your horse shod.
Of course, the smithy is really "just" an old passage tomb that's fallen in. And the legends are terribly old and fragmentary. But I like to let my sense of wonder run away with me: there were holly and ivy planted together just by the gate - ten points if you can explain why that's significant, and 50 points *with reference*. And... I found horse prints in the mud as we were leaving. Wheeee!
We left after not-very-long, because there were a few more things we had to fit into our day yet. To hurry mum and I up, dad strode ahead of us and met us halfway back with the car. The fog had lifted a long way, so the three of us detoured via the closest Uffington horse lookout - and found that the school group had ended up triumphantly at the same spot. And there, stretched rampant on the opposite hill, was the horse-dragon! Some of the school group were cheering, while others took turns rolling down the smaller hill. I felt like cheering, too. I'd grown up seeing pictures of this place, and now I'd seen the real thing. It's not the best vantage point (the horse's head is a little hard to pick from this angle)... but I was deeply and happily satisfied.
We drove back through Somerset, stopping for lunch at the Rose and Crown - the same pub that mum and dad had eaten in on their ill-fated sightseeing day 28 years ago. Rural England seems not to change at all, really. I had creamy potato soup, and my parents shared a "ploughman's lunch". The bearded man sitting at the bar had a very new puppy tethered to his stool on a leash, and he was slipping her biscuits while he sipped his pint of beer.
We drove on again, through more miles of green and hilly countryside. I saw a few more chalk-pictures in the distance as we passed; these were more recognisable as horses, but far more "tame" and modern; not so wild and fierce as Uffington's. Uffington's horse was to these, as the flesh-eating horses of Greek legend were to Thelwell's ponies.
Our road passed farmhouses, sheep, farmhouses, and then monoliths - we'd driven into Avebury stone circle. It's just like that - you drive complacently along, and then suddenly there are a ring of house-high rocks surrounding the road you're on. We drove out the other side, parked, and returned on foot to take a proper look.
Avebury is comparable to Stonehenge - just bigger, and without further rocks balanced on top. Mum says she's always thought of Avebury as being a sort of "female" counterpart to Stonehenge's "maleness" - and I see what she means, now. (Yes, my mother and I are folklore-mad hippies only a few steps away from joining the druidic cult and going skyclad. Don't let it bother you - dad and Pip never have).
Anyway, Avebury consists of a huge ring of standing stones, many of which are balanced on their pointiest ends and seem to defy any laws of physics that I'm familiar with. They're all different shapes, too - though just rough-hewn, not carved. I was enthralled; each one seemed to have a different "character" to the last. You can walk right up to the stones, even touch them if you're brave or disrespectful enough. As we wandered through and around the circle, the sun was going down and the stones were washed in pink and orange light. By the time we wandered back to the car, the stones were baleful silhouettes over our shoulders. I don't know how anyone could bring themselves to sleep soundly in the houses in the middle of that circle, at night. Rah. Where might you wake up?
We had blown our timing (though the day was worth it!), so the drive back was through the dark. It was alright at first, but then the navigation got tricky (so many roundabouts!), so I sat in the passenger seat to be "seeing-eye-Ele" again. We took a few wrong turns, so by the time we were back on the final stretch into Bath - again, that awful stretch down the hill without streetlighting - the fog had blown in again, twice as thick as the morning. We must have driven at about half the speed limit in those last miles, but we didn't care. Mum and I were both in terror-struck fugue states, I think.
We got home safely, though, and sat and wobbled for a bit until mum's nerves recovered. Pip was pleased to see us after spending the day doing homework. Dinner was pizza (which seems to have become our fallback). Mum and Pip and I stayed up late watching rather a good BBC adaptation of the Arabian Nights, while our boots dried out on the apartment's heaters. I regained feeling in my feet for the first time in several hours, which was quite a relief.
Trust my dear sister to blow the day's carefully crafted mystique, mind you. I tried to explain the Uffington horse to her by showing her my photos and sketching what the design looks like... but unfortunately my sketch looked more cute than majestic. Pip promptly named the horse in my picture "Cindy" and drew a horseblanket and scarf over the top of it, so it wouldn't look so cold in all that fog.
O tempora, o mores.
Posts
1 comment:
Fog in England, you don't say?!
But at least you got to see your horsey ;-)
I certainly hope that while in the UK you ate their national dish: curry!
Post a Comment