The Great Red Horse of Tiw’s Hill - by Neil Douthwaite
Buried beneath the hillside boughs the great horse sleeps. The harshest winter storms cannot rouse him, even as the roots whip with the swaying and bucking of the wind, stirring the iron red soil in which he rests. He is older than memories. From a time when stories were told but not written, stories which would evolve on each telling so that the tale of his birth was lost to time. He is now the faintest echo from the distant past, fading with each generation.
Once he watched over the wide open valley, where oxen ploughed the land into ridges that rose and fell like the swell of an inland ocean. The three great open fiields of the parish spread beneath him. He watched the clockwork of the year, the communal work of the village as they shared the burden of working the land, the fiields alternating from fallow brown, to emerald green, ripening to reapers’ gold. When the villagers created him they chose the high, steep scarp seen through the great East window of their church. For a while they feared a heavenly god, they clung to the power and spirit of the earth on which they depended. It was their great horse who would be their earthly symbol of reassurance and hope.
They dug him by hand to reveal his coat, stained red by the ironstone that leached into the clay, the same ironstone of their little thatch cottages below and, when he was finished, the setting sun lit the hillside and he glowed like burning bronze.The great horse watched over the relentless toils of the people. For the years and the centuries as they worked their land, gathered their crops, thatched their houses and gathered their fiirewood. He knew their fear of famine, when rains and hails and snows threatened all that they had worked for, and when their harvest fell to the scythe he felt their relief, and watched them collect the precious sheaves and stooks.
One day each year the people of the village gathered around him. When the blackbird sung in the warmth of the evening sun and spring showers swelled the scattered seed and fiilled the valley with the scent of thorn blossom, they carried mattocks and hoes to scour the ground, to groom his fllanks and sharpen his form. When they were done they sat astride his saddle, drank cider pressed from their orchards and sang songs of summer. He was their stallion, a war horse, galloping across a hillside named for a Saxon god. Tiw’s Hill, Tiges Hoh, Tysoe! He was the protector of his village, a talisman, a friend.
He was there when the black veil of plague cloaked the village with the smell of death. In the stillness of those darkest nights the children of the village dreamt, and in their dreams he cantered down to walk among their lanes and streets. Leaning in through their windows, the musky warmth of his breath would blow away the pestilence so that they would wake to feel the light of another dawn.
When Civil War cries and gunpowder charges exploded in the nearby parishes he cared not for the fiight between King and countrymen. He saw the blue clay of the Feldon flloor stained scarlet red with the blood of the fallen and stared down the armies, chasing them away from the parish borders and their fruitless battle.
But as the stories of the great red horse changed with time, so did the Lordships who oversaw the land. Where once they employed their tenants to refresh the horse’s image, now their descendants saw the upkeep of such idolatry as waste and folly. The great horse grassed over, gorse took root and briars crept towards his fading form. In time the villagers would try to awaken him. They would scratch the ground and carve equine shapes where he once strode, but those imitations never commanded the valley as he did, never captured his grandeur, or the power of his stride.
Then new ideas arrived as certainly as the chill winds of winter follow the hurry of harvest. The three great fiields, with their common lands and shared enterprise, were divided. Farmers enclosed their plots with fence and hedge and the labourers scratched out a living, tending meagre allotments and gleaning what they could before the crow or the plough could steal it away. People grew hungry, and hungry people do not tend to earthen horses. On his hillside the gorse encroached until maps surveyed a fiield of furze where once the stallion strode.
And so he slept. He slept as the last curlew nested in the thick grass of his mane and badgers snaffled the eggs. The whelps and trills of the bird were never to be heard across the Feldon fiields again. He slept as village men returned from foreign wars, bodies bloodied and memories scarred, trench rotten boots discarded, walking barefoot in the snow, limping homeward off Sugarswell Lane and down past the red horse fiield.
He slept as the Lordships eyed investment in growing timber and saplings rose from the steep, ungrazed ground in which he lay.He slept as the mighty elms in the valley withered and fell. He slept as the seasons warmed and cooled, the deer rutted and the hares boxed, the rains poured and the frosts froze and thawed. He slept as babies cried and elders died.
And still he sleeps, beneath his blanket of hillside boughs, above his village, among the roots and burrows, so that one day he might be woken to watch over the valley, to inhabit children’s dreams and chase away armies, to canter down beside the rushing brooks, towards the warm glow of the village lights, to walk among the ironstone lanes and streets once more.