About the model
The White Horse is Britain's oldest chalk hill figure, about 110 m long, near the top of the steep north-west-facing slope above the dry valley called the Manger, on the Berkshire Downs in Oxfordshire; its head points up the hill (south-west) and its body curves round the valley side towards Dragon Hill. It is not a plain cut in the turf: first made by exposing the bedrock, it was kept by trenches packed with rammed or puddled chalk, renewed again and again, so seven or eight surfaces lie one on another; it has narrowed slightly (the body about 1 m, a hind leg 0.6 m) and its slope has dropped by about 10 degrees; a concrete kerb now holds the belly edge. OSL dates on the hillwash put the first horse at 1380-550 BC (68%) or 1740-210 BC (95%), late Bronze Age or early Iron Age. Scoured by local people every seven years until 1857 (last by the landlord in 1892), covered in the Second World War, restored 1951-53, re-chalked by the National Trust's volunteers (since 2009); found shrinking up to 40% and widened from 2024. Above it, Uffington Castle, an early Iron Age hillfort (8th-7th century BC) of about 3.2-3.4 ha with a single rampart and ditch and a counterscarp bank, an entrance on the west and a blocked one on the east: first a timber-framed box rampart with a double row of posts, then a chalk dump rampart with chalk and sarsen kerbs, the ditch recut. Below it, Dragon Hill, a natural chalk knoll with an artificially flattened circular top.