This falls into the very cool category, particularly if you like horses + ancient history. It may be unusual to some that one of my fave places from our travels has been Britain’s oldest hillside carving, the Uffington White Horse; we’re surrounded by history here, but I am mesmerized by the really old stuff. It’s a taste of the mystical and mysterious, with quite a few unanswered questions, such as: why would people living approximately 3,000 years ago feel the need to carve a huge horse in a hillside?? One thing’s for sure: the timelessness of the horse-human connection (which I posted on previously here).
From the book HORSE – How the Horse Has Shaped Civilizations:
For millennia, horses have shaped belief…Epona, the Celtic horse-goddess whose daughter was Gaul, was taken up by the Roman cavalry as a spirit of that place; and, probably in honor of her British incarnation Rhiannon, the great white horse of Uffington – about 365 feet long – was cut out of the turf on a hillside in the Berkshire Downs over 2,500 years ago. The story continues all over the world, with horses snorting and snickering in sacred woods and on the wide-open steppes and in the skies and under the soil throughout the ages.
Unfortunately, the best view of the White Horse is from the air. Oh well. You can, however, walk all around it and view it up close, which we did. This is the sort of sightseeing that gives me chills; it reminds me that the poignant feelings I have around horses have deep roots in human history. Yeehaw and Namaste.