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This is the newest of Wiltshire's white horses and is located around a mile from where an older one had been. The new horse was to mark the millennium created in 1999, however for many years there had been talk of recovering or recreating the lost one, which although completely grown over for many years now, the outline could still be detected in some situations. The 1999 horse is the same design as the earlier one but turned to face the opposite way, the only one in Wiltshire facing to the right, as the Uffington White Horse does. Luckily in 1954, while the old horse was still visible, following a research project by pupils at Devizes Grammar School, Peter Greed a 6th form pupil, drew up plans for recreating it. It was these plans that were used to create the new one. The task of creating it involved two hundred local people with the assistance of heavy machinery supplied by Pearce Civil Engineering. The chairman of the Millennium White Horse project was Peter Greed (same person as boy above) and you can see him involved in placing a time capsule containing items pertinent to Devizes and Britain at the end of the twentieth century under the head of the horse, by clicking here. Its easy to find and see from an industrial estate, but not very photogenic and shortened by the position you are at. The previous Devizes White Horse It was not possible to recut the original horse due to this now being classed as a site of special scientific interest, and this was the reason for the move. The original site was SU 000647, about a mile west of the current horse, this was on the west side of Roundway Hill just below Oliver’s Castle hillfort, 2 miles north of Devizes, 3 miles south of Calne and 2 miles east of Bromham. This was an ideal site for a hill figure, overlooking the valley on a steep slope. This previous horse, locally known as the ‘Snobs horse' was cut at Whitsuntide in 1845 by a Devizes shoemakers apprentice (Snob is an old word for shoemaker). It was lost in about 1922, but at various times bits of the outline have been visible, the last time I can find recorded being in 1979 when freak lighting conditions and a fine dusting of snow, brought the outline of the head and back of the horse into view. There was a plan in 1939 to recut it, but the Second World War then took the attention away, and all horses were for the war years covered up, so enemy planes could not use them to navigate.
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