Uffington White Horse - The Uffington Horse in Popular Culture

The Uffington Horse in Popular Culture

• G. K. Chesterton's poem The Ballad of the White Horse gives a Christian interpretation to the continual scouring needed to maintain the impression in the chalk over the intervening millennia. This is achieved in the context of a romantic retro-medieval depiction of the exploits of King Alfred the Great.
• Rosemary Sutcliff's book Sun Horse, Moon Horse, a book for children, tells the story of the creator of the figure.
• Richard Doyle, a cartoonist and illustrator of Punch satirical magazine fame, illustrated the 1859 book The Scouring of the White Horse by Thomas Hughes, the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays. The book mentions both the horse and the Blowing Stone.
• The design of the Uffington Horse was used as the album cover of the 1982 album English Settlement by English rock group XTC, who come from the nearby town of Swindon.

• The Uffington Horse is the symbol of Wessex Hall at the University of Reading, adopted in 1920 and still in use today.
• The Uffington White horse is often presented as an image of Epona in popular works on Neopaganism, based on stylistic similarity with horses depicted on Iron Age British and Gaulish coinage, although the dating makes this very unlikely. There may also be an assumption that Epona statues depicted a white horse (the colour is unknown and this seems to be a confusion with Rhiannon).
• Faringdon Community College and Faringdon Infant School in Faringdon, Oxfordshire, use the White Horse as their logo.
• The horse is the emblem of the Berkshire Yeomanry, a Territorial Army unit based in Windsor, Reading and Chertsey.
• The White Horse is mentioned throughout the book This Is All by Aidan Chambers.
• A drawing of the horse appears, along with several other 'occult' symbols, on the cover artwork of the US rock band Nirvana's final album In Utero designed by Kurt Cobain in 1993.
• British artist Stella Vine chose the White Horse as her favourite artwork in a video filmed in May 2008 as part of Artangel's The Big Pix project, in which artists were filmed talking about their favourite artwork or destination. Vine described it as mysterious, atmospheric, pagan and inspiring.
• Caroline and Charles Todd's book A Pale Horse (2008) takes place in and around Uffington and centres around the White Horse. Wayland's Smithy is also mentioned.
• The White Horse is mentioned in the book What Time Devours (2009) by A. J. Hartley.
• White Horse Hill appears under the name of Red Horse Hill in the novel Runemarks by Joanne Harris.
• Clive Cussler refers to the Uffington Horse in his novel Trojan Odyssey, where it is the symbol of the cult presided over by Epona Eliade.
• The 1978 BBC television children's series The Moon Stallion uses the chalk horse as one of its principal locations and a major plot element, and includes footage of it in the title sequence.
• The Uffington Horse is used as a location in the 1993 film Map of the Human Heart.
• The Uffington White Horse is featured in the Jonathan Hare story 'Ignorant Armies' by Sam Wharton.
• A chalk carving very much like the Uffington White Horse is featured extensively in A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett, and the author discusses the Uffington White Horse specifically in an afterword.
• An animated version in the music video for "Sonnet" by The Verve in 1998.
• The Song of the White Horse, a 1977 composition for Orchestra and Chorus by David Bedford.
• The Uffington White Horse features prominently in the Summer of Magic Quartet, a book series centered around Celtic mythology. The first book in the series is titled The White Horse Talisman.