The countryside would look very different were it not for horses. Tiffany Francis- Baker reveals some of the surprising ways horses have sculpted our landscapes
At close quarters, the Uffington White Horse could be any other path scratched into the Oxfordshire hillside. Those bright chalk lines, pressed into the earth by human hands, are designed to be seen from far away. Across the Vale, it is much easier to make out the strange beaked horse over 100 metres long, galloping over the hill.
This is one of a handful of chalk figures scattered across the British landscape, and it has been so well cared for in its 3,000-year lifespan that it had to be covered in turf during the Second World War so Luftwaffe pilots couldn’t use it for navigation.
Why a community of Bronze Age Britons went to the trouble of making it is still unclear, but of all the animals to appear in prehistoric imagery, the horse is one of the most common. Our ancient ancestors obviously venerated horses. Later, the Anglo-Saxons used at least 16 Old English words for horses, each distinguishing between those used for carts, luggage, riding, breeding, royalty and war. So what is it about this animal, this half-tamed hybrid of pet, tool and vehicle, that has captivated the people of Britain for thousands of years?
The earliest known ancestors of the modern horse were small, dog-sized creatures that lived in North America around 55 million years ago.
They first arrived in Europe by crossing the Beringia Land Bridge, a grassland steppe between Russia and Alaska that was exposed during the last Ice Age, enabling plants, animals and humans to migrate back and forth across the two continents. But it was not until the last 150,000 years that a relationship formed between humans and horses
In Europe, they were one of the most hunted species, alongside bison and reindeer, almost driven to extinction before they were domesticated around the Bronze Age, when evidence suggests they were farmed for milk, meat and transport.
When were horses domesticated?
By the end of the Bronze Age, a wave of human migration had swept the globe, and with it the domestication of the horse started to change the way people ate, farmed, hunted, travelled, worked and waged war. By the 8th or 9th centuries, the Islamic conquest of Spain and the English crusades helped introduce Arabian stock to Europe, and the horse-breeding industry was born.
Since the introduction of horses on an agricultural scale, the British landscape has been shaped by them – right down to the blades of grass that sweep iconic landscapes such as the South Downs and Salisbury Plains. These former forests, denuded of trees for timber and fuel during the Neolithic period, were turned over to pasture for large grazing animals, and it is mainly the centuries of constant grazing by horses and other animals that has kept them from returning to woodland. Later, horses helped transform the wild landscape into a pastoral one, hauling logs from cleared woodlands and pulling ploughs.
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Why are so many pubs named after horses?
Signs of the importance of the horse in our rural history crop up everywhere. Have you ever bought a pint from a pub called The White Horse, The Plough, The Nag’s Head, The Fox and Hounds, or The Coach and Horses?
It’s possible you were in a farming village, where men gathered at the end of a long day of ploughing the fields with their horses. Or you may have been on a popular hunting route, where the riders would dismount for a drink after a morning in the field. Or more than likely you were in an old coaching inn, an echo of life before railways and cars replaced the horse-drawn stagecoach.
Cities, towns and villages in the UK are littered with equestrian clues such as these, revealing how much we once relied on the domesticated horse in our daily lives. Just south of the River Thames in Southwark, The George Inn is thought to be the last remaining galleried inn in London, now in the care of the National Trust. It’s evidence of the network of coaching inns up and down the country, built to shelter travellers making their way around the UK by horse-drawn stagecoach, the principal means of transport around the country for more than two centuries.
Horses, too, were fed and watered there. Hundreds of inns survive, although in many cases the stables have been demolished or converted. Some, like The George, retain original fittings from the stagecoach era; one of the bars even contains a rare tavern clock, whose large dials helped travellers and coach drivers set their watches.
Horses and ponies played a crucial part in Britain’s canal network, too, drawing canal boats from the towpath. In Birmingham, a purpose-built stable called the Roundhouse was designed for passing canal traffic.
These are relics of the legal use of horses; but there are also signs of their nefarious use. On the borders of England and Scotland, the rolling countryside is scattered with fortified dwellings known as bastle houses, with few windows and thick stone walls.