24 On the White Horses of Wiltshire. 



Danes entrenched themselves was what is now called Bratton Castle 

 — a long encampment with double ramparts, enclosing about 23 

 acres of ground. It would take more than the limits of this paper 

 would allow to go at all into the arguments which have been adduced 

 on one side and other in this matter. I think however, that I may 

 say that the balance of authority seems rather to lean to the side of 

 Edington, and if so the Westbury White Horse would stand between 

 the scene of King Alfred's victory and the stronghold from which 

 he subsequently drove the defeated Danes. 



But alas, even if this be the case, the memorial of King Alfred's 

 victory has long ceased to exist — ruined by the same unenlightened 

 spirit of miscalled restoration which has destroyed so many precious 

 remains of medieval architecture in order to substitute for them 

 piles of the best builders' Gothic, bristling with crockets and finials 

 and mouldings cut out by Messrs. Somebody-or-other's patent process 

 at so much per dozen or per yard ! 



Fortunately however, we possess a drawing of the old horse made 

 in 1772 by Gough, the Editor of Camden, of which I show a copy 

 (see Fig. 3.)^ The dimensions, as given by Gough, are : extreme 

 length, 100 feet ; extreme height, nearly as much ; from toe to chest, 

 54 feet. This does not agree with his drawing, which I consequently 

 imagine to represent the horse as foreshortened by perspective. 



And here I must call attention to the curious crescent-shaped tip 

 given to the tail, which one would perhaps have been disposed to 

 regard as accidental were it not that on more than one ancient 

 British coin we find something more or less resembling it, and on 

 one very clearly cut coin of Cunobeline, of which I shew an outline 

 (see Fig. 7), we fiad, together with the horse, a crescent introduced, 

 evidently for some set purpose. And this I think can possibly be 



* This is the only one of all the figures which is not drawn to scale, the fact 

 being that the measurements as given by Gough are incompatible with his 

 drawing. I have therefore simply reduced the latter to the scale upon which 

 the modern horse is drawn, taking the girth as my point of departure. 



It will be observed that the old horse is represented as facing to sinister, 

 though the modern one faces to dexter. This however I take to be simply a 

 mistake on the part of the engraver, who probably copied the original drawing 

 upon his block as it stood, instead of reversing it. 



