I'm delighted to have found a forum for this topic.
Now and again, in a dry pub chat moment, I raise the origin of the White Horse until we become fluent again. We ride the ancient horse until we fall into the present.
Anyway, it struck me clearly when thinking about the understanding of anatomy by the original artists (specifically to what extent their medical thinking involved the integrative models nowadays used e.g. in Alexander Technique and Rolfing) that the horse is plainly a representation of Great Britain.
Initially, of course, this was merely a remarkable coincidental conceptual rhyme, since the earliest known "map" is from about 500 BCE, and the Horse is about 3000 years old (from soil analysis). Also it looks like a horse. And I am no obsessive.
Nonetheless, the more I looked, the less any other possibility remained. I have, perhaps, hypnotised myself staring at this horse into an obsessive set of beliefs.
Well, at least, then, the artists who made it understood the deepest aesthetic tricks.
Can you align the front "leg" with the Western peninsula, and the next one with Wales (the unusual but deliberate bump could be Anglesea or the Mersey Estuary)? I noticed the neck aligning with the Eastern bump and the back with the dreary march along the Penines.
Scotland goes a bit funny, compass direction-wise, but the Western Isles lie where the detached limb is, and who needs Ordnance Survey orientation when you're talking about that massive and mountainous land?
Oh, yes, it works, and to a remarkable scale accuracy, when the eye is placed over the Isle of Wight.
Which brought me to thinking about what it was for. What is a map for? Exploration and invasion, I think, In the modern "Post-Norman Conquest" world. But imagine people from all over meeting up there and sitting on a blanket on "their bit" (maybe not a blanket, maybe a horse, or a nice chair). They could know their neighbours and integrate the island most efficiently. It may have been a parliamentary site. That would be funny, because the site of the White Horse itself is located in a stream of breath from those strange whistling lips.
They did something similar in ancient Egypt, didn't they? They aligned the Nile with the Milky Way, and built the tombs where big stars are in relation.
I like the possibility of a dual-purpose astronomical alignment for the horse, as well. They were clever back then, after all.
Anyway, I'm glad some of my thoughts are now announced out there. Perhaps they will resonate into culture like a big "Gee Up". Perhaps I am a mad dog barking up the wrong tree.
