“White Horses of Wiltshire” – a talk by Garry Gibbons at the Coronation Hall, Alton Barnes

Wiltshire’s Chalk Horses — ‘Why?’

Remains the Only Question Wiltshire’s stable of equine chalk hill-figures are arguably the county’s most prominent group of landscape monuments. They have persisted across the decades due to a strong symbiotic relationship between each chalk horse and its local community.

Yet the simple question of why this nationally unique herd of current — and lost — chalk horses were corralled within a small area of Wiltshire across the 18th and 19th centuries continues to evade us.

This talk begins by exploring how today’s popular understanding of Wiltshire’s chalk horses came to be established, it then proceeds by presenting recent investigations at Marlborough and Devizes, the results of which demonstrate that a more nuanced understanding of the county’s equine chalk hill-figures can be achieved through a combination of topographic survey and social history research.

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