54 Westbury under the Plain. 
however, another kind of fog, always surrounding these objects, 
through which it is by no means easy to see one’s way: and that 
is, their real history. Our friend Mr. Plenderleath is the White 
Horse champion, and has taken the subject under his special pro- 
tection in an interesting little book, which probably many of you 
may have read. He has a whole team of them to deal with, for 
there are, I believe, no less than eight in the county of Wilts alone, 
besides one or two in the North of England: and I see by the 
programme that he has something more to say about them. There 
are only two out of our eight that have any claim to antiquity : the 
two I have just mentioned ; and even of these two the one on Bratton 
Hill is only a second edition, the original figure, which was of more 
antique shape, having been destroyed by a land agent a little more 
than a hundred years ago. All the rest are not old horses, but only 
young colts, set up to prance on the hill sides, some of them within 
the memory of man. Some years ago one of our farmers was asking 
me about these things, what they meant? I told him the little I 
knew, how old some were said to be: but as to the one at Marl- 
borough I did not know how old that one was. “Oh,” said he, “TI 
can tell ’ee that, for I helped to make him. We boys at Mr. 
Gresley’s school worked at it.” One opinion, perhaps the one most 
generally held, about the old white horses, is that they were cut out 
upon the turf to commemorate a great victory; and it is certainly 
a historical fact that King Alfred did win a battle against the 
Danes, at Ashdown, near the Berkshire white horse. And it is 
also a historical fact that he did defeat them again at another place 
called Athandun, which is interpreted by many archeologists to be 
your Edington. It is entirely beyond the limits of this paper to go 
into all the details of the discussion to which this has given rise : 
for there are no less than six places that compete for the honour of 
being the very identical spot on which Alfred crushed for a time 
the power of the Danes in this country. What makes it so difficult 
to decide the point is, that every one of those places has a name 
sufficiently like Aithandun, and, further, every one of them has also 
a strong hill fortress close at hand to which the defeated might 
have fled, as in the history of the event, written at the time, they 
