Drawn together

Sitting on a hillside in Oxfordshire, I shift my weight, change the angle of my body, and move the lump hammer from one hand to the other. I look down, select a lump of chalk – the biggest within reach – and let the hammer drop. The metal does the work; the chalk crushes softly. I chase the lump as it disintegrates. I repeat the action, breaking the chalk into finer and finer grades, before shifting my attention to the next patch.  

The chalk is part of the White Horse of Uffington, a giant piece of land art cut into that Oxfordshire hillside sometime in the late Bronze Age, roughly 3,000 years ago. Nobody knows who first cut the marks, or what they meant by them. We are not even entirely sure what animal they were meant to represent. But one thing we do know is that it has endured because, generation after generation, century after century, millennium after millennium, people have cared for it.  

The Horse requires continual grooming. If the chalk is not renewed, it grows muddy and grey, and plants – weeds and otherwise – encroach on its outline. Leave it a year and the figure grows indistinct; leave it a decade and it starts to vanish. Thirty years, I’m told, would be enough for it to vanish altogether. The Horse is a piece of art, but the art is not just the image cut into the hillside: it’s the activity that keeps it vital. The Horse is the visible trace of activity that has persisted, without any plan or organisation, for thousands of years. The artwork is the chalking.

From my position on one of the Horse’s legs, I can see only a small part of its form. What I can see instead are the friends, old and new, who have come here to chalk the Horse with me. Around me is the gentle thumping of hammers; the breeze brings snippets of birdsong and human chatter. When I look up and out to the far horizon, there are fields and hedges, tree-lined roads, the occasional village with its spire or tower. From up here it feels as though all the land below can see that we are here for the people down there: repairing their Horse, cleaning her, as people always have, getting her bright again for another year looking out over White Horse Vale. 

Deep-time perspective 

The work of chalking is not complex. Most of it is not particularly arduous. It just needs to be done. The historic scourings – recorded for at least 350 years, but certainly going back far further – were communal, festive occasions. Thomas Hughes, newly famous for Tom Brown’s School Days, decided his next book should be a fictionalised account of the scouring he had attended in 1857: a fair on the hill, cheese and ale, wrestling and games, all recounted by a young clerk who comes to the scouring as a holiday from his London desk. It’s in much the same spirit that my 21st-century team of chalkers visit the Horse each year.  

There are no fairground attractions to distract them today, though: the Horse is now a Scheduled Ancient Monument in the care of the National Trust. Andy Foley, the Trust’s Area Ranger, has a small team of volunteers who care for the Horse year-round, but chalking needs a crowd. So, twice a year, a wider community is invited. Since 02019, that’s included a delegation from Long Now London (LNL), a collective dedicated to considering the challenges of the present in the context of much longer time spans than we usually might, meaning hundreds or even thousands of years. Our monthly gatherings bring together all sorts of parties – technologists, artists, philosophers, writers, heritage specialists and more – who are interested in how we can reframe the way we think about the ramifications of our actions. The leading zero in the year as I’ve written it above is one reminder that the past and future extend much further than we normally consider in our day-to-day lives. 

Many of us have returned to the Horse year-on-year and, as we do, we learn the ways of chalking and pass them on to newcomers. There’s no correct way to chalk the Horse, because there are no instructions, nor even a particular objective. We might imagine conservation as the prevention of change, but archaeology reveals that the Horse has shifted shape across the centuries. Its legs, tail and ears have lengthened and shortened, its lines have thickened and thinned. Debate has raged – politely – as to whether the Horse should be ‘restored’ or left as it now is; compromises have been made, and plans drawn up accordingly.  

At the micro level, chalking is simple, but it still has its subtleties – how to avoid strained muscles, how the chalk crumbles, how to avoid straying out of your patch – and these are passed on. The Horse will always need new carers, and they will always learn from those who have been before. The anthropologist Tim Ingold writes of generations as fibres twisted together like the strands of a rope, each life overlapping with those before and after. The strength of the rope lies in the connection – and the friction – between those overlaps. The Horse persists in much the same way: each generation of chalkers learns from those who learned before. What is passed on is not a specification, but a practice.