MANE ROADS
Cycling Plus UK|May 2023
Wiltshire has eight giant horses carved into its chalky hillsides. Rob Ainsley saddles up to ride them all...
Rob Ainsley
MANE ROADS

stonehenge. Avebury. Long Barrows. Crop circles. White Horses. There's something weird about Wiltshire. Must be those open plains and chalk slopes: a blank canvas to send messages to the gods. Or, as some would have it, extra-terrestrials to us.

Britain has many hill figures in the shape of a giant steed round the country. Most famous is the ancient one on the Ridgeway at Uffington, Oxfordshire. But it looks more like a weasel, sketched by Picasso. And if you cycle there, you'll be disappointed. Folkestone's kitschy, new-fangled horse is only visible from the train as it ducks into the Channel Tunnel. At least Yorkshire's effort, at Kilburn on the edge of the North York Moors, is a landmark view from many a ride.

Wiltshire, however, has eight horses in all, more than everywhere else put together, all hacked out the turf in the last 300 years by people with spades, not aliens with laser beams.

I collected the lot in one baking hot day last summer: a lovely 70-mile circular trip from Pewsey, through open, billowing, uplifting, hills-and-plains scenery. Here's what happened.....

1. Pewsey White Horse 6.30am 

Pewsey's horse, cut in 1937 to replace an earlier lost one, is the smallest of Wilts' eight canonical nags: 20m by 14m, roughly tennis-court sized, though on a 25% gradient, rallies would be brief. Getting there, as with most of the Wiltshire White Horses (WWHs), involves a long, steady 100m-plus climb from the flatlands up the hillside via a narrow lane. I lock my bike to the fence, needlessly - nobody's around this cloudless morning - and walk through dry knee-high grass down the short footpath to the figure.

Denne historien er fra May 2023-utgaven av Cycling Plus UK.

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Denne historien er fra May 2023-utgaven av Cycling Plus UK.

Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.

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