Nearby Wantage (where we go on Monday nights for cheap movies in a theater which only has two screens total) is the White Horse, which is a man-made chalk formation on a hill from ages past, and it can only completely be seen from the air...
Travels in the United Kingdom 1997
White Horse
Nearby Wantage (where we go on Monday nights for cheap movies in a theater which only has two screens total) is the White Horse, which is a man-made chalk formation on a hill from ages past, and it can only completely be seen from the air...
Here's the actual White Horse in the first image...I couldn't get all of it to show, no matter how hard I tried, but many of the local companies (including the Volkswagen car dealership where I acquired this one) in Wantage use the White Horse as their logos, so in the other image you can see that it does look like a stylized horse...
Looking left from the White Horse picture above, you see a hill with a bald chalk spot at the crest. That is supposedly where St. George killed the dragon, and the hill is bald due to the dragon blood split there...and that's why it's aptly named St. George's Hill...
On the same grounds as the White horse is one of the oldest "castles" in Britain, Uffington Castle. It's really just an earthwork, which is a hill that is obviously not natural in origin, but you can see that it surrounds a large enough area for a fairly decent-sized settlement. To read the sign, click on it for a larger image...
Even though you can tell it was overcast & raining in July, I was still impressed by the variety of colorful wildflowers against the green hills...but I'm afraid you might not be able to tell in this picture...?
About a mile's hike away from Uffington Castle and the White Horse is Wayland's Smithy, which is another ancient formation, this time in stone, of which no one knows the origins. It was quite a muddy hike in the rain, but we did finally make it...
It's assumed that this large mound with these stones at the front is some sort of grave marker, but it's called Wayland's Smithy because of local medieval legends that told if you left an offering at the Smithy, your horses would be shod the next morning (or something like that)...
You can't go very far, but you can climb inside a little bit...
Here's Marcus sitting from where I just took the last picture, so maybe you can get a sense of how large the stones are. The mound itself is probably 50 yards long by 25 yards wide, so it's no tiny little thing...
Copyright ©1996-2008 Britta Blvd. All rights reserved. All text, photos, graphics, artwork and other material on Britta Blvd
are copyrighted and may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without prior written consent.
