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Having a visitor from abroad is always a good excuse to go and play tourist, and a visit from my old school friend Carol resulted in a trip down the M4 into Wiltshire on a Bank Holiday Monday to search for white horses carved into hillsides. We saw three, and must have been close to a fourth near Marlborough, but didn't manage to track it down.
If you want to see a larger image of any of these pictures, please click on the picture.
The largest of the Wiltshire white horses is to be found at Westbury. |
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It is possible to get to the top of the hill. We went up there, but didn't actually climb over the horse, although plenty of other people did. You can see people if you click on these larger images, and they are dwarfed by the size of this horse. |
The next horse we saw was near Pewsey_Down. This is very much smaller than the Westbury White Horse. I don't have any people in these images for scale, but the enclosure protecting the image was only the size of a smallish garden. The pictures were taken from some distance down the road using a Tamron 85-210 lens zoomed to 210 and mounted on a 2x adaptor, with the whole lot on a tripod. The image on the left is the whole of the frame. When editing it, I discovered that at high magnification there was evidence that this really was a horse, and not a mare, so I included the cropped image on the right, which gives sufficient magnification for this evidence to be viewed. Photographically, it's really beyond what the photo should have been enlarged to, so the image isn't all that crisp. |
There is a small plaque with details about the Cherhill White Horse and the nearby Lansdowne Monument.
The text on it reads as follows: |
Last Revised: 20th November, 1999.