KINGDOM NEW LANDS WHITE HORSE SERIES
It's kind of a A pixel-art 2D side-scrolling action-strategy game where you accumulate and spend resources to try to beat a series of levels. These giant carvings are a fascinating glimpse into the lives and minds of their creators and how they viewed the landscape in which they lived.A pixel-art 2D side-scrolling action-strategy game where you accumulate and spend resources to try to beat a series of levels. But this does not lessen their importance. The fact that the figures could disappear so easily, along with their associated rituals and meaning, indicates that they were never intended to be anything more than temporary gestures, which have only survived either by accident, or in the case of the White Horse of Uffington, by the continued existence of extraordinary tenacious local tradition.
Compared to the huge stone permanence of structures like the Avebury Monuments and Stonehenge, hill figures are much more transitory, ten or twenty years without scouring and the carving could be lost forever. New archaeological and geological evidence is increasingly indicating a medieval date for the giant naked human figures, which some historians have argued were products of an age of civil war and extreme political turmoil in England, when satire was sometimes the only weapon. The reasons for the creation of these hill figures are probably as varied as the figures represented. Nowadays the accompanying festival has gone and the task of maintaining the Horse is undertaken by English Heritage, the organisation responsible for the site, the last scouring taking place on JCE. Up until the late 19th century CE the White Horse was scoured every year, as part of a two day Midsummer country fair, which also included traditional games and merrymaking. George connection with the White Horse is a confused memory of some strange prehistoric ritual performed on Dragon Hill by its creators, perhaps as long as three thousand years ago. The blood of the dying dragon was supposed to have been spilled on Dragon Hill, leaving a bare white chalk scar where to this day no grass will grow.
A legend connected with Dragon Hill, a low natural flat-topped mound situated in the valley below the White Horse, suggests that the Horse depicts the mythical dragon slain by St. There are some who believe that the great carving does not represent a horse at all but a dragon. If, as is now believed, the Celts were settled in Britain at the latest by the end of the Bronze Age, then the White Horse could still be interpreted as a Celtic horse-goddess symbol. Bronze and Iron Age sun chariots, mythological representations of the sun in a chariot, were shown as being pulled by horses, as can be seen from the 14th century BCE example from Trundholm in Denmark. Others, however, see the White Horse as connected with the worship of Belinos or Belinus, 'the shining one', a Celtic sun god often associated with horses. Some researchers see the Horse as representing the Celtic horse goddess Epona, who was worshipped as a protector of horses, & also had associations with fertility. Alternatively, the carving may have been created for ritual / religious purposes. The latter end of this date range would tie the carving of the Horse in with occupation of the adjacent Uffington hillfort, and may perhaps represent a tribal emblem or symbol marking the land of the inhabitants of the hillfort. The result was a date for the Horse's construction somewhere between 1400 and 600 BCE, in other words it had a Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age origin.
However, in 1995 CE Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) testing was carried out by the Oxford Archaeological Unit on soil sediments from two of the lower layers of the Horses body, and from another cut near the base. Due to the similarity of the Uffington White Horse to the stylized depictions of horses on 1st century BCE Celtic coins, it had been thought that the creature must also date to that period. However, the carving is believed to date back much further than that. The earliest documentary reference to a Horse at Uffington is from the 1070's CE when 'White Horse Hill' is mentioned in Charters from the nearby Abbey of Abingdon, and the first reference to the Horse itself is soon after, in 1190 CE.
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