Custom · Uffington · Famous
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Scrub it every seven years, or lose it.
See it clearly
National Trust car park off the B4507; walk up. Please don't walk on the figure. Check before you go.
Every seven years the villagers climbed up to scrub their horse white again, and then they feasted.
Cut into the chalk below an Iron Age hillfort, the Uffington White Horse is the oldest hill figure in Britain, dated to the later Bronze Age or Iron Age. If no one cleaned it, grass would soon swallow it. So once every seven years, from at least 1677 until the late 1700s, local people held a midsummer 'scouring'. They weeded and cleaned the outline, then held a fair and feast inside the hillfort ramparts. Some have linked the horse with St George's dragon on the hill below.