On White Horses and Hill Tops..

A week ago today, Ian and I went on one of our serendipity road trips. Originally we’d intended to head for Glastonbury which I’ve not been to in years, then perhaps head off to Wells, but we left Hampshire a little late in the day to get to either location in good daylight, so instead decided to point the car in the direction of Marlborough and just drive around until we saw something that took our fancy. I love days out like this, particularly when we take off to counties such as Wiltshire, rich with a landscape that resonates it's ancient history.

First stop was Silbury Hill. I’m kicking myself now that I didn’t take a photo of this wondrous man-made neolithic mound from a different angle – there’s a road that runs behind it which I think more effectively shows you the sheer scale and impact Silbury has, looming out of the Wiltshire countryside as it does – but having not taken a coat with me on our journey and having stood taking photos being buffeted by January winds, chill enough to turn the very bones in your body to ice, it just didn't happen!



See that lovely blue sky? The one looming over Silbury with the faintest hint of a moon still hanging in the heavens behind it? In the course of time it took us to get back in the car and drive a couple of miles down the road to the Avebury Standing Stones, it turned from that to this;



which, given my coat-less, still bone-chilled state of being, meant no getting out of the car for me! Actually, whilst this sounds like a cop out on my part, the stones themselves were absolutely heaving with visitors, which I think was indicative of the New Year Bank Holiday. Not my idea of fun to be honest, so I contented myself with taking photos from the road as we drove around the stones into Avebury, with a view of perhaps returning on a week day when things are perhaps a bit less hectic there.

One of the things I really love about this part of Wiltshire is the sheer number of trees you see clumped in rings, dotted around the countryside. I absolutely love this kind of tree formation, which always seem magical and mystical; haunts of ancient peace if you will. If ever I'm out and about I always take photos of them to use in photoshop or just look at when I get back to the urban blandness of my home town, so you can imagine my delight when, quite by accident, we stumbled upon the White Horse of Cherhill, carved in 1780 into a hillside beneath the tree-ringed Oldbury Castle, an Iron Age Hillfort covering some 20 odd acres of land. By this time the weather had most definitely taken a turn for the worse, so I hastily stopped the car and dodged the sleet laden showers in an effort to get an image....any image...of this lovely spot. This, terrible, grainy, gloom laden photo, was as good as it got;



Disappointing to say the least, as was this shot of another ring of trees taken from the passenger seat of our moving car a few minutes later;



Dull, blurry and speckled with rain drops falling onto the closed window of our car.

Last night, sat going through my photos to see if I could salvage anything of worth, I decided to fiddle around with them in photoshop, superimposing the image of the chalk horse onto the smeary image of the ring of trees, then played around a while with textures and a couple of the Layer Settings, and came up with this;



My own version of the White Horse of Wiltshire - all be it in a somewhat modified manner! The horse, of course, isn't as pretty, nor as ancient as it's better known Uffington contemporary, but in it's own way it works for me, even if I did have to take some pretty bad photos along the way!

*** My apologies if anyone subscribed to my blog is getting multiple 'edits' of it in their dashboard - blogger is playing silly buggers today and won't let me include photos in my usual manner, hope it wasn't too distracting for you!***