The gate of the year

The White Horse of Uffington, Oxfordshire, England, is a figure excavated on the side of a hill, removing the grassy turf and bringing to light the chalky ground underneath. Similar figures are relatively numerous in this region and are generally datable between the XVIII and XIX century. However some of them could be more ancient and among them there is that of Uffington, whose style recalls the horse representations on Celtic coins, and that has been dated by some scholars even to the late Prehistoric era (1000-700 B.C.): but it is difficult to establish with precision a reliable dating for this construction.
In every case, the horse had a remarkable importance for the Celts, particularly in Ireland, where it was associated with the ceremony of enthronement of the new king, called banais ríghe. According to Giraldus Cambrensis’s report, a cleric of the XII century, the king had to mate with a white mare, symbolizing a sacred marriage between the king and the goddess of the land. The mare was then sacrificed and cooked into a broth that the king had to drink. Irish mythology remembers also the figure of Macha, an ancient Celtic divinity. In the tale, she was a mysterious woman, coming from the Otherworld, who married a young human farmer, assuring the abundance of harvests to his land, but requiring that he should never brag about her qualities. The prohibition is violated when the husband claimed that his wife could beat the king’s best horses in a race. The woman, who was pregnant, won the race, but died giving birth to two twins. It is possible that Macha was originally a warrior goddess, associated with horses and weapons, probably interpretable as a horse-woman herself (Monaghan 2004).

[Image: http://www.whitehorsechallenge.com/]




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The White Horse of Uffington, Oxfordshire, England, is a figure excavated on the side of a hill, removing the grassy turf and bringing to light the chalky ground underneath. Similar figures are relatively numerous in this region and are generally datable between the XVIII and XIX century. However some of them could be more ancient and among them there is that of Uffington, whose style recalls the horse representations on Celtic coins, and that has been dated by some scholars even to the late Prehistoric era (1000-700 B.C.): but it is difficult to establish with precision a reliable dating for this construction. In every case, the horse had a remarkable importance for the Celts, particularly in Ireland, where it was associated with the ceremony of enthronement of the new king, called banais ríghe. According to Giraldus Cambrensis’s report, a cleric of the XII century, the king had to mate with a white mare, symbolizing a sacred marriage between the king and the goddess of the land. The mare was then sacrificed and cooked into a broth that the king had to drink. Irish mythology remembers also the figure of Macha, an ancient Celtic divinity. In the tale, she was a mysterious woman, coming from the Otherworld, who married a young human farmer, assuring the abundance of harvests to his land, but requiring that he should never brag about her qualities. The prohibition is violated when the husband claimed that his wife could beat the king’s best horses in a race. The woman, who was pregnant, won the race, but died giving birth to two twins. It is possible that Macha was originally a warrior goddess, associated with horses and weapons, probably interpretable as a horse-woman herself (Monaghan 2004). [Image: http://www.whitehorsechallenge.com/]