Helen Stephenson's White Horses and Standing Stones Pictures

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Having a visitor from abroad is always a good excuse to go and play tourist, and a visit from my old school friend Carol resulted in a trip down the M4 into Wiltshire on a Bank Holiday Monday to search for white horses carved into hillsides. We saw three, and must have been close to a fourth near Marlborough, but didn't manage to track it down.

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The largest of the Wiltshire white horses is to be found at Westbury.

It is possible to get to the top of the hill. We went up there, but didn't actually climb over the horse, although plenty of other people did. You can see people if you click on these larger images, and they are dwarfed by the size of this horse.

The next horse we saw was near Pewsey_Down. This is very much smaller than the Westbury White Horse. I don't have any people in these images for scale, but the enclosure protecting the image was only the size of a smallish garden. The pictures were taken from some distance down the road using a Tamron 85-210 lens zoomed to 210 and mounted on a 2x adaptor, with the whole lot on a tripod. The image on the left is the whole of the frame. When editing it, I discovered that at high magnification there was evidence that this really was a horse, and not a mare, so I included the cropped image on the right, which gives sufficient magnification for this evidence to be viewed. Photographically, it's really beyond what the photo should have been enlarged to, so the image isn't all that crisp.

After Pewsey Down, we visited Avebury. There are no white horses here, but the standing stones on this site make Stonehenge look like the child's plaything by comparison. The site isn't as well preserved as Stonehenge, and some stone locations have markers in them where stones have disappeared, but the scale of the place is huge, and what's even better, it's free to visit!

The final white horse we visited was at Cherhill. By the time we arrived here, the sun had been set for some time and twilight was well advanced. The trusty SLR camera set to work with a will, though.

There is a small plaque with details about the Cherhill White Horse and the nearby Lansdowne Monument. The text on it reads as follows:

"Set on Cherhill Down in an area of outstanding natural beauty lies the second largest of the Wiltshire White Horses."

"Cherhill White Horse was cut in 1780 and constructed by Dr. Alsop who directed the operation from the London Road using a loud hailer."

"The Horse is 129' long and 142' high, and is owned and looked after by the Cherhill Parish Council."

"Nearby is the Lansdowne Monument which is 125' high - built by Lord Lansdowne in Memory of his ancestor, Sir William Petty."

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Last Revised: 20^th November, 1999.