Uffington

Uffington today

Uffington lies in the Vale at about 280 feet, a mile or so north of the Downs, and is built around a loop of interlinking lanes of chalk-block, brick and thatch. With 851 residents at the 2021 Census it is one of the larger villages west of Wantage. It has a primary school, a village shop and post office next to the memorial hall, and the Fox and Hounds pub. There are football, cricket and tennis clubs. The White Horse Show is held each year. Faringdon is about 4 miles to the north-west.

Most visitors come for White Horse Hill, run by the National Trust, which is reached by lanes and footpaths climbing south from the village to the Ridgeway.

History

White Horse Hill

The White Horse is a stylised horse about 110 metres long, made of trenches cut into the hillside and packed with chalk. In the 1990s the Oxford Archaeological Unit dated silts from its lowest layers by optically stimulated luminescence to between about 1380 and 550 BC, the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age, which makes it the oldest known chalk figure in Britain. Above it is Uffington Castle, an Iron Age hillfort of about three hectares enclosed by a bank and ditch. Below lies Dragon Hill, a natural knoll with an artificially flattened top where, in local tradition, St George killed the dragon, and the steep dry valley called the Manger. Roman coins have been found on Dragon Hill, and Romano-British and later Saxon burials near the camp.

The hill is named as mons albi equi, White Horse Hill, in an Abingdon Abbey record of the later 11th century. For centuries villagers kept the figure clear. Scourings, with a fair and games on the hill, are recorded from 1755 until 1857, and Thomas Hughes described the 1857 scouring in The Scouring of the White Horse (1859). During the Second World War the horse was covered over so that it could not guide enemy aircraft. Today the National Trust holds chalking days with volunteers.

Name and Domesday

The name, recorded as Offentune in the 10th and 11th centuries, means Uffa’s farm or estate. Between 924 and 941 a nobleman named Athelstan gave Uffington to Abingdon Abbey. In 1086 the abbey held 14 hides here in demesne, with 60 households, 85 acres of meadow and a mill, and a further six hides were held from it by a tenant named Gilbert.

Manors after the Dissolution

The abbey surrendered the manor to the Crown in 1538. In 1541 it was bought by John Malt, Henry VIII’s tailor. In 1620 it was sold to Elizabeth, Lady Craven. Her son took the title Viscount Craven of Uffington, and the manor stayed with the Earls of Craven into the 20th century. The parish was enclosed in 1776.

The church

St Mary’s was rebuilt from the ground up in the first half of the 13th century and has kept that plan. It is cruciform, with chapels off each transept, a south porch with a room above, and a central tower that turns octagonal above the roofs. Its size has earned it the local nickname ‘Cathedral of the Vale’. The stone spire was blown down in a storm on 2 December 1740, and the top of the tower was rebuilt in 1742. G. E. Street restored the chancel and transepts in 1851. John Betjeman, who lived at Garrards Farm in the village from 1934 to 1945, was a keen member of the congregation.

The school and Thomas Hughes

The chalk-built schoolroom south of the church was founded in 1617 by Thomas Saunders of Woolstone, and dated panels of 1617 and 1634 survive on it. It became the village museum in 1984, named after the school scenes in Tom Brown’s Schooldays. Thomas Hughes was born in Uffington in 1822, where his grandfather was vicar, and he spent his early boyhood here before writing the novel (1857).

Canal and railway

The Wilts & Berks Canal crossed the parish from 1805 to 1807 and was abandoned in 1914. The Great Western main line runs just north of the village. Uffington station was the junction for the Faringdon branch from 1864 and closed in 1964. Uffington moved from Berkshire to Oxfordshire in 1974.

Things to see

• Uffington White Horse, Uffington Castle, Dragon Hill and the Manger (National Trust, open access; car park off the B4507)
• St Mary’s Church (Grade I), with its octagonal tower and 13th-century detail
• Uffington Museum in the 1617 schoolroom (open weekend and bank holiday afternoons, Easter to October, at the time of writing)
• Garrards Farmhouse, John Betjeman’s home from 1934 to 1945 (private, seen from the lane)
• The Ridgeway, with Wayland’s Smithy long barrow about a mile and a half to the west