IT is not difficult, with a little imagination, to picture the scene among those battle-hardened Viking warriors, draped in thick skins, huddled around crackling fires, as they camped within the sturdy earth ramparts of White Horse Castle next to that enigmatic hill carving 1,143 years ago.

Gulping ale from their drinking horns, singing bawdy songs, listening to yarns of great Norse deeds, toasting heroic victories of the past and heartily cursing their mates while silently calling on Odin to make their death – should it come – an honorable one, thus ensuring a heavenly passage to Valhalla.

Certainly, they would have been brimming with confidence. Rampaging through the countryside they had slaughtered many a Saxon and pillaged many a settlement without much resistance. A few days earlier they had repelled a determined Saxon attack on their camp at Reading.

They were, however, set for something of a rarity in the winter of 871 – a well-deserved bloody nose. Descending from White Horse Hill ten miles from the town we today know as Swindon, the “Great Heathen Army” clashed with the Saxon rabble whose 1,000-strong ranks not only included a large number of locally levied farmers but were led into battle by a stripling, a mere boy of 21.

Wet-behind-the-ears he may have been, but the warring whippersnapper who commanded one half of his brother King Ethelred’s army that day went on to become the Saviour of Wessex, the Bane of Danes and the man who laid the foundations for the English nation.

He wasn’t known as Alfred the Great then, just an untried Wessex prince desperate to defend his homeland or die in the process. Reputedly riding his favorite mare – hopefully a white one – Alfred seized the day by spurring his men into action while Ethelred, commanding the other flank, dithered in prayer.

Little is known about the Battle of Ashdown except that a clash of shield-walls – two armies crunching with a metallic thud into each other, screaming and cursing – became a “huge melee” which ended with the Vikings fleeing in disarray, leaving many a dead Dane on the boggy, bloody ground beneath the lofty and ancient Ridgeway Path.

It wasn’t an emphatic victory but it was still a victory: one which established Alfred’s reputation among the beleaguered men of Wessex as a skillful leader who could – and eventually did – turn the Viking tide. Had he died that day, who knows, we could all be speaking Danish.

The precise location of the battle remains uncertain although it was certainly near Uffington, not far from the Borough of Swindon’s present-day eastern border.

Indeed, the Danish King Bagsecg cut down by Alfred’s hardy farmhands, was reputedly buried at the nearby Wayland’s Smithy long barrow, which, even then, was more than 4,000 years old I love the story mainly because it has become part of the history, mystique and folklore of the White Horse at Uffington – one of the two world renowned archaeological wonders that bookend Swindon; the other – naturally – being the Avebury stone circle.

Sadly, our knowledge of the Dark Ages and beyond – battles, archaeological sites etc – is shrouded in mystery and myth… including the enigmatic White Horse hill carving itself. Even 20 years ago no-one knew how old it was; they were just guessing.

Some maintained it was cut on the steeply sloping, chalky downs to mark that first victory of Alfred’s over the Danes. Others, that it was created a few hundred years earlier by the newly arrived Saxons whose leader, Hengist, had a white horse on his standard. As invaders they were the bad guys then.

Circa 100BC was also forwarded, as an image similar to that of the singular chalky hill carving appeared on contemporary coins. The medieval Red Book of Hergest (1375-1425) yields no clues but offers a delightful description of the 360ft long figure, to wit: “There is a mountain with a figure of a stallion upon it and it is white. Nothing grows upon it.”

We now know that this magnificent landmark – whose sinuous curves give the impression of a work of modern art rather than an antiquity – was fashioned approximately 3,000 years ago, sometime between 1,400 and 600BC.

For this we can thank “optical stimulated luminescence” – a revolutionary method used by archaeologists in the 1990s. OSL showed that soil under the chalk, which was packed tight to create the figure, was last exposed to the sun around three millennia ago.

This, said the team, was far earlier than expected. The revelation ended around 300 years of bickering and controversy over the origins of a monument described by 12th Century scribes as one of The Wonders of Britain.

It may well have been constructed by the Britons responsible some 2,800 years ago for the virtually adjoining Uffington Castle – an impressive 32,000 square metre stronghold of earth banks and ditches, topped with sarsen stones.

It is the most overused adjective in the English language but the Uffington White Horse truly is iconic.

But whoever built the stately nag – and for whatever reason – forgot one thing. They forgot to patent it.

As a consequence the instantly recognisable image of the lithe and leaping figure that can be seen for miles around has been used free-of-charge as logos and publicity tools for countless firms and organisations.

And it is well known to people of a certain age, with a certain good taste, as gracing the olive green sleeve of English Settlement, the fifth LP by a group of local minstrels, XTC.

 

Best known for writing Tom Brown’s School Days, Thomas Hughes also 
produced a book detailing the age-old local custom of The Scouring of the White Horse, an event which over the years evolved into an annual festival attended by up to 30,000 people

He is the renowned author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the semi-autobiographical Victorian novel concerning public school life that spawned the excellent bully and cad Harry Flashman.
Two years after its publication Uffington-born Thomas Hughes in 1859 followed it up with a book that throws fascinating light on an age-old local tradition, The Scouring of the White Horse.
Hughes relates that, for as long as anyone could remember, the horse on the hill was held in such reverence by villagers that every year they gave it a good old spring cleaning.
What initially appears to have involved a spot of elbow work adding chalk and getting rid of weeds evolved, over many decades, into a full-blooded, full-throttle country festival – The Scouring Fair – that attracted, at its height, a staggering 30,000 people.
Numerous and diverse were the attractions that included carthorse and donkey races, hurdling, wrestling matches, chasing a cheese down White Horse Hill and climbing poles to retrieve legs of mutton.
A pig was set loose and the person who caught it kept it. Fete-goers were challenged to retrieve a bullet from a tub of flour. Jingling, a form of blind man’s bluff, presumably provoked fits of laughter.
In 1808 a gallon of gin was offered to the woman who smoked the most tobacco in an hour. No Government ’elf warnings in those days. Bands of musicians with drums and pan-pipes, along with circus-like performers added to the colour, noise and general buffoonery.
Hughes, whose book was republished in 1989, wrote: “The whole Ridgeway was alive with holiday folk, some walking with their coats and bonnets off, some in great wagons, some in all sorts of strange vehicles such as I had never seen before.”
He recalled a double line of booths and stalls “making a long and broad street, and all decked out with nuts and apples and gingerbread… and all sorts of sucks and food, and children’s toys, cheap ribbons, knives, braces, straps and all manner of gaudy looking articles.”
Intermittent “scourings” of the famed horse continue to take place: indeed, a group of hardworking local folk were at it with their hammers, trowels and buckets of chalk only last month.
The revelries which accompanied it, however, have galloped off to the area’s annual White Horse Show – sadly, minus the cheese chasing and jingling!