The Uffington White Horse
A sleek white horse 110 metres long has galloped across an English hillside for 3,000 years, kept alive by people scouring it.
What was reported
Cut into the chalk of White Horse Hill, in Oxfordshire, is a strikingly modern-looking figure of a horse, about 110 metres long, made of trenches filled with crushed chalk. It's best seen from the air or from across the valley.
For centuries people assumed it was Anglo-Saxon. Local people held regular 'scourings', with fairs and festivities, to clean the chalk; without them it would have grown over and vanished.
Explanations offered
In the 1990s, luminescence dating of the soil showed it was first made in the late Bronze Age, around 1000 BC, making it Britain's oldest known chalk figure. Why it was made, and whether it's even a horse rather than another animal, is still discussed.
- When
- Made around 1000 BC
- Where
- Uffington, Oxfordshire, England
- Witnesses
- Generations of local people, who kept it clean
- Status
- Mostly explained
Famous cases are real, widely reported events. Each file sets out what witnesses said and the explanations that have been offered, without taking a side.