Vale of The Red Horse - Subsequent Horses

Subsequent Horses

A third, substantially smaller figure, facing in the opposite direction (South) to the earlier horses, was extant in the 18th century, when there was much discussion of the figure by local antiquarians. Reverend Francis Wise put forward a theory, based on local tradition, that the horse had been scoured annually on Palm Sunday to commemorate Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick's participation in the Battle of Towton, while a Reverend William Asplin ridiculed Wise for his theories on this (and other) hill-figures. This incarnation of the horse was both confirmed on contemporary maps and in 1772 measured fairly exactly by Richard Gough, who described it (in an 1806 reference) as "croup to chest, 34 feet; shoulder to ears, under jaw to bottom of chest, 10 feet; shouder to ground, 16 feet or 57 hands; length of off foreleg, 12 feet; length of near foreleg,9 feet; hindlegs, 10 feet; belly, 19.5 feet; sheath, 8 feet; tail (more like a lion's), 18 feet; width of each leg 1 foot; diameter of the eye, 1 foot 2 inches long". It was acknowledged at the time that this was much smaller than the earlier "colossal" Horse.

The third Red Horse was eventually destroyed when a Mr Nicholls, the landlord of nearby inn the Sunrising House, had it ploughed up around the time of the enclosures. However, Nicholls found that the ending of the annual fair or wake associated with the 'scouring' of the Red Horse affected his takings, and subsequently arranged for a fourth Horse, even smaller, to be cut near Sunrising Covert around the beginning of the 19th century.

Nicholls' Horse, which was regarded as having no antiquarian interest, had vanished by 1910. A possible fifth Red Horse was cut on Spring Hill, some distance from the original site, subsequent to the cutting of the fourth, but this final version had disappeared sometime shortly after 1914, although some elderly residents interviewed in the 1960s claimed to remember having seen it.