MANE ROADS

Wiltshire has eight giant horses carved into its chalky hillsides. Rob Ainsley saddles up to ride them all...

- Rob Ainsley

stonehenge. Avebury. Long Barrows. Crop circles. White Horses. There's something weird about Wiltshire. Must be those open plains and chalk slopes: a blank canvas to send messages to the gods. Or, as some would have it, extra-terrestrials to us.

Britain has many hill figures in the shape of a giant steed round the country. Most famous is the ancient one on the Ridgeway at Uffington, Oxfordshire. But it looks more like a weasel, sketched by Picasso. And if you cycle there, you'll be disappointed. Folkestone's kitschy, new-fangled horse is only visible from the train as it ducks into the Channel Tunnel. At least Yorkshire's effort, at Kilburn on the edge of the North York Moors, is a landmark view from many a ride.

Wiltshire, however, has eight horses in all, more than everywhere else put together, all hacked out the turf in the last 300 years by people with spades, not aliens with laser beams.

I collected the lot in one baking hot day last summer: a lovely 70-mile circular trip from Pewsey, through open, billowing, uplifting, hills-and-plains scenery. Here's what happened.....

1. Pewsey White Horse 6.30am 

Pewsey's horse, cut in 1937 to replace an earlier lost one, is the smallest of Wilts' eight canonical nags: 20m by 14m, roughly tennis-court sized, though on a 25% gradient, rallies would be brief. Getting there, as with most of the Wiltshire White Horses (WWHs), involves a long, steady 100m-plus climb from the flatlands up the hillside via a narrow lane. I lock my bike to the fence, needlessly - nobody's around this cloudless morning - and walk through dry knee-high grass down the short footpath to the figure.