When a person unknown daubed a flag of Saint George over the town’s new riverside mural last month, it was quickly overwritten with a diagonal cross and the words “Frome says no to fascism. We are all human.” The widespread marking of walls, roundabouts and zebra crossings across the country, together with numerous flags strung up on lamp-posts, has had me reflecting anew on a landmark I can just glimpse from my garden – one that rears up before travellers from so many locations.
I must walk to the very top of our hill for the full effect. Standing on a field of shaved wheat stubble, my eyes go straight to the hilltop horizon above Bath. Then they are caught by a sunstruck and ethereally sharp figure on the chalk downs out east. A tiny, blazing white horse – tiny at 10 miles, that is – an earth-cut constellation sitting on an upwards slant, as if answering to heaven.
Every London-bound train passes beneath the folded pleats over Westbury, and from each carriage the little pony becomes a mighty stallion, 50-plus metres from muzzle to tail. On a journey in July, I regaled an awestruck Texan couple opposite with the horse’s heroic origin story – that it was chiselled out of chalk more than 300 years ago to celebrate a King Alfred victory nearby against the Danes. A darker alternative suggests that it was a hoof-stamp of fragile authority – that the horse was put there as a symbol of Hanoverian rule at a time when the crown was anything but secure.
History lost its anchor on this figure, so that until lately it was a horse, just a horse – one that moors this landscape, the one of Eric Ravilious’s fine painting. And then some devilish sense of mischief or whatever possessed someone to cover it with a red cross. An act that did not last long nor cause damage, it nevertheless felt to me like a violation, a countryside icon trashed, a besmirching of beauty with divisive politics.
Let us hope that this too fades from memory and that the white horse again becomes a lodestar for travellers. One that says to all, regardless of creed or colour: “We are all human. Welcome.”
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
