Searching for a white horse

Forty miles from Oxford, a white horse looks out across the rolling landscape. It has been there for three thousand years, this white chalk outline of a running horse. Deep trenches were dug during the Bronze Age and filled with crushed white chalk about the time Deborah became a judge or maybe when David became a king. Over the centuries, local people have gathered regularly to keep the outline clean, trimming the grass, scouring the chalk, and adding more every year so that the horse has always been white and shining, visible from a great distance.

Glimpses

I first encountered this horse on a hike this summer with my family. We saw this year’s bags of new chalk, ready for a community day. There were information boards around, too. I liked the one which tells how the horse walks down the hill at night to drink from the stream. The kids liked geology facts about which hills were formed by retreating glaciers.

Approaching the horse from over the fields, we caught glimpses of a shock of white against the green. We followed the path which curved up and over where the horse lay, and we could see the line of its back like a white path. Further up the slope, there were earthworks to climb, hand-dug fortifications where people lived millennia ago. At the top of the hillfort, only wildflowers grow now, clover and thistles marshalled by heavy bumblebees, weirdly steady in the constant wind. We looked down, but the horse was hidden by the shape of the land.

On our way back toward the valley, we climbed another small hill, this one steep and flat-topped. The hill had been quarried and the summit levelled by the Dobuni, a Celtic tribe that lived in the area before the Roman invasion of Britain. As I climbed up, a woman came down towards me and asked if I knew where she could see a good view of the chalk horse.

“I was hoping from up on top of this hill.”

She shrugged and laughed and said I’d need to keep walking. I climbed the hill anyway. From the top, the view was lovely, but the woman was right. The horse was still only visible in pieces.
This felt strange. On every information board, the shape of the horse was clearly marked. Four running legs, the toss of its tail and its head, its belly a thicker path. But there seemed to be no hill, no rise in the fields from where you could see the whole form. Was it designed to be seen from above?

Later, we spotted gliders in the sky and helicopters above us. There must be a local business that takes tourists up to look down.

September grace

That’s the image I am carrying into September. An ancient white horse we see in parts. We’ll be stepping back into routines, some old and some new, and soon enough, we’ll lose perspective. It can be hard to see what shapes we’re making with our repeating actions. Sometimes, we’ll only catch a flash of white against the green, and sometimes the hills will feel too steep and block our view. But there is grace to be found in perseverance and faithful practice and grace, too, in the moments when someone in our community can lift us up and help us see our long-formed patterns from a new perspective.