July is the month for horse-cleaning. I join in with the annual re-whitening of the Uffington horse in Oxfordshire. The horse was created possibly three thousand years ago by digging a 2 metre deep trench and then filling it with chalk. It's hard to express my wonderment at this monument, how did they dig those trenches (probably slaves). How was it designed, the horse is so big that when you're working on it it's hard to remember which bit of the body you're on.
Is the creature actually a horse? there's whiskers on it's face - referred to as the 'beak' which only makes sense when you hear that an excavation in the '90s revealed that the whiskers had originally been a metre longer. The 'horse' has changed over the millenia by encroaching turf which is why the beak isn't very beaky. It had been noted that the rate of turf-encroament meant that the lines around it's head would disappear completely in a few years. Which is why this year we helped an archeological team to restore the lines to an earlier width.
One of the team brought along horsey tattoos for us all - I might make mine permanent.
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