Red Horse of Tysoe

The Vale of the Red Horse is a rural area in South Warwickshire, England, below the escarpment of Edgehill in the parish of Tysoe. It takes its name from the hill figure of a horse once cut into the red clay. The figure, sometimes referred to as the Red Horse of Tysoe, was first recorded in 1607, and in its earliest form was nearly 100 yards long. Various dates have been suggested for its creation, ranging from the Anglo-Saxon period to the 15th century.

It was recut several times over the next two centuries in widely differing forms and locations, giving a total of at least five different horse figures in the Vale. The last Red Horse was finally covered over around 1910 or 1914.

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 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:

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 [the Vale], and the Earth all looking red the horse lookes so as that of the white horse vale".

A third, substantially smaller figure, facing in the opposite direction (South) to the earlier horses, was extant in the 18th century, when there was much discussion of the figure by local antiquarians. Reverend Francis Wise put forward a theory, based on local tradition, that the horse had been scoured annually on Palm Sunday to commemorate Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick's participation in the Battle of Towton, while a Reverend William Asplin ridiculed Wise for his theories on this (and other) hill-figures. This incarnation of the horse was both confirmed on contemporary maps and in 1772 measured fairly exactly by Richard Gough, who described it (in an 1806 reference) as "croup to chest, 34 feet; shoulder to ears, under jaw to bottom of chest, 10 feet; shouder to ground, 16 feet or 57 hands; length of off foreleg, 12 feet; length of near foreleg,9 feet; hindlegs , 10 feet; belly, 19.5 feet; sheath, 8 feet; tail (more like a lion's), 18 feet; width of each leg 1 foot; diameter of the eye, 1 foot 2 inches long". It was acknowledged at the time that this was much smaller than the earlier "colossal" Horse.

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