Vale of The Red Horse - History of The Red Horse

History of The Red Horse

Although the cartographer John Speed refers to Red Horse Vale in 1606, the first clear mention of the Red Horse of Tysoe occurs in the 1607 edition of William Camden's Britannia. Camden wrote:

"a great part of the very Vale is thereupon termed the Vale of the Red Horse, of the shape of a horse cut out in a red hill by the country people, hard by Pillerton"

A second mention of the Red Horse was made in 1612 by the Warwickshire poet Michael Drayton, while another more explicit account was given by antiquary William Dugdale, who was given the task of recording features of interest around the country in case the Parliamentarians should seek to destroy them. In his Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated (1656), he wrote:

"Within the precinct of the Mannour of Tishoe now belonging to the Earl of Northampton there is cut upon the side of Edgehill the proportion of a Horse in a very large forme; which by reason of the ruddy colour of the earth is called the Red Horse, and giveth denomination to that fruitful and pleasant country thereabouts, commonly called the Vale of the Red Horse: the trenches of which ground where the shape of the said Horse is so cut out, being yearly scoured by a Freeholder in this Lordship, who holds certain lands there by that service."

Whenever it was first cut, it appears that this first horse (called the "Great Horse" by its later researchers Carrdus and Miller) did not survive long after the 1650s. Later soil surveys clearly indicated a second, smaller horse (the "Foal") overlapping and adjacent to the "Great Horse", possibly identifiable with a figure seen by Celia Fiennes some thirty years after Dugdale: "a red horse cut on some of the hills about, and the Earth all looking red the horse lookes so as that of the white horse vale".