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THE LAND of the WHITE HORSE David Miles

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THE LAND of the WHITE HORSE David Miles THE LAND OF THE WHITE HORSE David Miles THE LAND OF THE WHITE HORSE Visions of England CONTENTS In memory of: Introduction 6 Alan Saville (1946–2016) and Martin Dyer (1948–2017) 1 The Bourn Identity 12 A band of brothers on the M5 2 Altering the Earth: The Prospect from the Ridgeway 29 3 Landmarks and Boundaries 48 4 The Last Pastime 69 Frontispiece: Photograph by Angus Haywood looking 5 The White Horse: Theories and Speculation 84 out from the White Horse to Dragon Hill and beyond. 6 Light from the Dark 95 7 The Wonder Horse 114 First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Thames & Hudson Ltd, 181A High Holborn, London WC1V 7QX 8 Domesticating the Horse 125 The Land of the White Horse © 2019 9 A People of Chariots and Horsemen 141 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London 10 The Sun Horse 161 Text © 2019 David Miles 11 Changing Horses: Survival in Difficult Times 175 Designed by Karolina Prymaka All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be 12 Strange Meetings: reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, Old Gods and New Gods 195 electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. 13 Reinventing the Nation’s Past 218 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data 14 Into the Modern World 240 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Afterword 263 ISBN 978-0-500-51993-6 Notes 266 Printed and bound in China by Reliance Printing (Shenzhen) Co. Ltd Bibliography 275 To find out about all our publications, please visit Sources of Illustrations 280 www.thamesandhudson.com. There you can subscribe to our e-newsletter, browse or download our current Acknowledgments 281 catalogue and buy any titles that are in print. Index 282 THE BOURN IDENTITY CHAPTER ONE THE BOURN IDENTITY How little do we know of the business of the earth, not to speak of the universe; of time, not to speak of eternity. Edward Thomas, 1909b TUESDAY, 24 JANUARY 2017: WALKING IN THE RAIN Drops drip. They spangle the surface of the River Lambourn with wid- ening concentric rings. An impeccably white egret stalks, slowly, in the rain. It stabs shifting targets in the shallow water. As we watch from a low bridge, the egret flaps its wings and slowly rises like a ‘seraphic soul’.1 On a bleak January day the egret is a startling question mark. This exotic stranger would look at home on the banks of the Nile or the shores of a tropical island. Twenty years ago, when I spent several months tramp- ing this downland landscape on the shifting border between Oxfordshire Edward Thomas, the nature writer and poet of the Downs, photographed and Berkshire for an archaeological research project, I never saw such a at his home in Steep (Hampshire) in 1914, three years before his death creature. Now they are relatively common. This was the first of several in France on the Western Front. egrets we were to see in the next few days, stepping carefully and elegantly in the bright chalk streams of North Wessex. England has warmed suffi- habits. He didn’t include the women’s pipe-smoking competition in his ciently to provide a home even in winter for this distinctive immigrant. White Horse scouring games of 1857. Edward Thomas (1878–1917), the great I walk beside my wife, continuing upstream along the trail marked walker and poet of the South Country, was a connoisseur of clay pipes. on the Ordnance Survey map as the Lambourn Valley Way. On the head- In one poem, he has a Gypsy woman ask: ‘Then just a half a pipeful of lands of the ploughed fields fragments of chalk lie like confetti. In the rain, tobacco can you spare?’3 During the Great War he sees clay pipes as memo- nodules of flint glisten blackly. Like the egret I walk head downwards, the rials of generations of unknown soldiers: habit of an archaeological lifetime – scanning the soil for traces of Roman pottery or prehistoric worked flint. I don’t see any, only, disguised among The one I smoked, the other a soldier the chalk, a white fragment of a clay pipe. Had some farm labourer, strug- Of Blenheim, Ramillies and Malplaquet gling with the plough, bitten the end off, cursed and left the fragments on Perhaps….4 the ground? Gypsy women also had a fondness for clay pipes. Thomas Hughes (1822– The North Wessex Downs and the Vale of the White Horse are studded 1896), Uffington’s upright Christian author of the English public school with the memorials of the Great War in which Thomas and many local classic Tom Brown’s School Days,2 rather disapproved of such unfeminine young men died. They dug trenches in the same chalk deposits that stretch 12 13 THE BOURN IDENTITY THE BOURN IDENTITY from Berkshire, Wiltshire and Kent beyond the White Cliffs and the strode the chalklands.5 With big open views and limited shelter, the Downs Channel to Arras and Vimy Ridge in France. Local stones list the names of are traditional hunting country. the youthful dead; their bones lie in foreign fields. Now, with so many of the fields soaked in herbicides and pesticides, We continue upstream. Within minutes two red kites (Milvus milvus) are the distant hum of traffic has replaced the thrumming of insects. Arable tacking overhead. They seem to be checking us out, distinctive with their weeds, old grassland and corn stubble no longer provide the habitats and forked tails, russet colour and massive, bent wings. The naturalists of the foodstuffs on which the birds of the open country thrived. Even in the chalk downs, a century or more ago, made no mention of these impres- mid-nineteenth century, Thomas Hughes complained about the advance sive birds. Not surprisingly. Like the egrets they are newcomers, or at least of the plough and the loss of meadow. ‘Farmers’, he is reported to have recent returners. The Reader’s Digest Book of British Birds, which I acquired said, ‘would plough up their fathers’ graves to grow turnips.’ But farmers in 1974, shows a red kite glowering from the page. ‘Even now’, it tells us, respond to pressures and incentives, to the environment in which they ‘there are only about a score of pairs, confined to their remote stronghold find themselves. It is for all of us to decide our priorities. in the hill-country of central Wales.’ Like ancient Britons seeking a retreat The rain falls relentlessly, a constant mizzle; we head into the worka- from Rome, the kites clung on in central Wales – even if they did not thrive day village of Lambourn, named after its river. Its importance a thousand in that barren, sheep-sheared fastness. Then in 1989 they were reintro- years ago, as the centre of a large Anglo-Saxon estate, is reflected still in its duced into the Chilterns, 50 km (30 miles) to the east of where we stood impressive church of St Michael. This area is remarkable for the series of by the River Lambourn. For several years motorists on the M40 motorway, Anglo-Saxon land charters that describe local estate boundaries with great from London to Oxford, exclaimed in delight as these great birds soared precision (see p. 51). In 1032 St Michael’s Church is recorded as a minster – languidly above the road where it cut through the Chiltern scarp and in other words, a church of regional importance before the English parish exposed the ancient calcareous seabed. system was fully established. The building that dominates the village The ancestors of the red kites above us probably patrolled the foetid centre today was remodelled by the Normans and many generations since alleys and shambles of medieval London, the city’s garbage collectors, have added their flourishes. until changing human habits almost drove them to extinction. Now they North of the village the waters of the Lambourn seep out of the chalk. are back, apparently thriving over the North Wessex Downs in search The precise position of the source varies. Winterbournes appear in the dry of small, scuttling creatures, rabbits and carrion. The ‘detested kite’ of valleys only at the wettest times of year and where, exactly, varies. As we Shakespeare’s King Lear is no longer an urban scrounger. The red kite and walk northwards along the routeway formed by the river, now reduced to a the little egret are both reminders of the constant change that takes place stream, the water finally disappears, sucked beneath the chalk hill. in the landscape around us. It is us – human beings – that are now the The slopes above are marked by a group of prehistoric mounds known, major change agents. with no regard for numerical accuracy, as the Seven Barrows. There are But we should not console ourselves with the idea that the new certainly more than thirty of them. Most are round barrows constructed to arrivals compensate for the losses. The poets and observers of the down- mark graves in the centuries before and after 2000 bc in the Early Bronze lands in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as Richard Age. The builders may have been attracted by the presence of an ancient Jefferies, W. H. Hudson and Edward Thomas, relished the huge number long barrow – the work, about six thousand years ago, of the first farmers and variety of birds. Over months of walking on the Downs we have seen and the most ancient burial ground in this area of the North Wessex small gaggles of linnets, flitting ahead of us, but no goldfinches, fieldfares, Downs: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon’.6 They began the yellowhammer s or kestrels.
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