Western Daily Press (Saturday)
‘You could almost reach out and touch the clouds as they floated by’
Earlier this year David Clensy set off on a long walk – seeking to tackle the 93 miles of Wiltshire’s White Horse Trail, joined in the adventure by his 10-year-old son, Charlie. His new book, Walking the White Horses, follows their progress. In this extra
As I strode across the top of the escarpment with Charlie, it felt as though we had walked into Ravilious’s most famous painting – especially when we looked down to see a train snaking its way across the distant landscape, behind the sleek outline of a modern locomotive AUTHOR DAVID CLENSY
IT all began, appropriately enough, on a white horse – the Devizes White Horse at Roundway. Settling on a bench at the brow of the hill, above the field in which the figure of the white horse had been carved out of the chalky landscape, my family and I gazed out across the rolling Wiltshire landscape that seemed to stretch almost infinitely into the distance on that warm late spring afternoon.
“According to the information board up there,” I said, nodding back towards the large white sign standing a few hundred yards away, “there’s a trail – a 93-mile, circular walk that takes in all of Wiltshire’s white horses. We should do it. It’d be something to aim for – something to achieve.”
I turned, expecting to see a wave on enthusiasm from my wife and two young sons, but they were all busy either gazing out at the view, or (in the case of my elder, 12-year-old son George), gazing intently at the screen of his mobile phone. My wife just nodded in a humouring sort of way. “You should do it,” she agreed, deftly ruling herself out of the adventure in four words, whilst still managing to sound encouraging.
My youngest son, Charlie, who had just turned 10, was casting a pair of binoculars across the horizon. He looked up with a glint in his eye. “I’d like to do it with you!” he beamed. “I think it’d be brilliant. I’ve always wanted proper walking boots.”
“Have you?” I muttered, glancing in puzzlement at the pair of trainers that he kicked backwards and forwards in front of him as he sat on the bench. “You’ve never mentioned it before.”
The next day, Charlie decided to join me on my regular walk – just a little over a mile, looping through the Wiltshire Wildlife Trust-managed woodland that stretched beyond the field behind our Trowbridge home. Green Lane Woods had become something of a God-send during the strange days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when for a bewildering period, we were all told we could only leave the house for exercise. Many people will remember that feeling that was something like a kind of house arrest – and the curious, unprecedented desire we all suddenly felt to go out and walk around the countryside. As the lockdown restrictions finally started to lift, our daily constitutional stroll around the woods inspired more and more walks around the wider Wiltshire countryside.
By the late spring of 2023, these daily rambles had sufficiently built up my leg muscles, hardened my heels and encouraged the sense of pleasure I could gain from experiencing the environment of my own home county, to seriously consider the idea of walking the White Horse Trail. The sunshine already had a warmth in it when we arrived at Westbury White Horse on a spring Sunday morning. Clare had driven us up to the dusty car park, and she and George joined Charlie and I for the first few hundred yards – striding over to a bench on the edge of the plateau. I handed her my mobile phone, to take a photograph of Charlie and I standing together with the familiar shape of the Westbury White Horse behind us, and a sky of merging gradients of blues speckled with a few wisps of cloud. Up there, on the escarpment edge of Salisbury Plain, it felt as if you could almost reach out and touch the clouds as they floated by.
With the vale stretching out before us, a patchwork quilt of green and yellow fields, diminishing away towards a distant horizon, dotted with occasional church steeples and clusters of homes, Charlie and I turned from the camera lens and looked out, taking in the enormity of the landscape we were about to step into. The distinctive figure at Westbury is the oldest White Horse in Wiltshire – dating back to 1778. The present carving was preceded by an earlier version on the same site, which it is thought could have been many hundreds of years older.
Legend has it that the original Westbury White Horse might have been carved out of the landscape to memorialise King Alfred’s victory over the Danes at the Battle of Ethandun, which took place just a few hundred yards from the site in 878AD. The horse itself has been a potent symbol of strength and fertility since Celtic times.
There are eight White Horses still visible in the Wiltshire landscape today – Westbury, Devizes, Cherhill, Broad Town, Hackpen, Marlbor
ough, Pewsey and Alton Barnes. Our 93-mile walk would take in them all. But the most famous – and the oldest by many centuries – the Uffington White Horse, is outside Wiltshire, over the border in present day Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire).
The tradition of carving figures into chalky hillsides extends beyond horses – with two white crosses in Buckinghamshire, military badges carved by soldiers based on Salisbury Plain worked into the hillsides at Fovant, and the more ancient hill figure “giants” being favoured in other areas, such as the distinctive Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex, and the famously well-endowed Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset.
The original Westbury White Horse, like the ancient Uffington
White Horse, was right-facing (or dexter, to use the proper terminology) and small enough to be completely consumed beneath the new figure, which measures a stately 55.5m (182ft) across, and 32.9m (108ft) in height. The latest incarnation of the creature was cut in 1778 by the appropriately named Mr G Gee, steward to the landowner, the 4th Earl of Abingdon, Willoughby Bertie (17401799), who reputedly was unimpressed by the stylised representation of a horse that had been visible here for countless centuries, preferring to “improve” the realism of the creature in this age of enlightenment, when the equine paintings of George Stubbs had reached the zenith of their popularity. As a consequence, today’s Westbury White Horse, which is now left-facing (or sinister, to use the official term), does now seem to boast the most life-like proportions.
The equine hill figure’s most familiar place in popular culture is in the distinctive work of Eric Ravilious, whose swirling landscapes captured the very essence of these hillsides in numerous works. A print of his masterpiece Train Landscape has taken pride of place on the wall of my home office for the last couple of years. Painted in 1939, it shows the Westbury Horse as seen from the window of a railway carriage passing across the vale below on its journey towards Westbury Station.
Ravilious died in 1942, his aircraft lost without trace in the icy waters of the north Atlantic, off the coast of Iceland, while conducting a search and rescue mission for another downed aeroplane. But as I strode across the top of the escarpment with Charlie, it felt as though we had walked into Ravilious’s most famous painting – especially when we looked down to see a train snaking its way across the distant landscape, behind the sleek outline of a modern locomotive.
I half fancied that if I looked hard enough at the windows of the carriages, I might just catch a glimpse of the ghost of Ravilious looking up at our silhouettes as we walked over the back of the White Horse.
“How are the new walking boots?” “They’re brilliant,” Charlie smiled. “So comfortable.” With that he strode on confidently along the chalk path beneath the pale blue sky. Our journey had begun.
Walking the White Horses: Wiltshire’s White Horse Trail on Foot, by David Clensy, is available now from Amazon, Kindle, independent bookshops and local visitor attractions, priced £8.99.