The carving has been placed in such a way as to make it extremely difficult to see from close quarters, and like many geoglyphs is best appreciated from the air. It is not far from the Bronze Age cemetery of Lambourn Seven Barrows, which consists of more than 30 well-preserved burial mounds. The Uffington Horse is also surrounded by Bronze Age burial mounds. 7th century BCE) hillfort of Uffington Castle and below the Ridgeway, a long-distance Neolithic** track. The horse is situated 2.5 km from Uffington village on a steep close to the Late Bronze Age* (c. The elegant creature almost melts into the landscape. The Uffington White Horse is a unique, stylised representation of a horse consisting of a long, sleek back, thin disjointed legs, a streaming tail, and a bird-like beaked head. That fact that any ancient hill figures survive at all in England today is testament to the strength and continuity of local customs and beliefs which, in one case at least, must stretch back over millennia. Furthermore, over hundreds of years the outlines would sometimes change due to people not always cutting in exactly the same place, thus creating a different shape to the original geoglyph. One reason that the vast majority of hill figures have disappeared is that when the traditions associated with the figures faded, people no longer bothered or remembered to clear away the grass to expose the chalk outline. However, the grass would soon grow over the geoglyph again unless it was regularly cleaned or scoured by a fairly large team of people. The method of cutting these huge figures was simply to remove the overlying grass to reveal the gleaming white chalk below. While many historians are convinced the figure is prehistoric, others believe that it was the work of an artistic monk from a nearby priory and was created between the 11th and 15th centuries. More controversial is the date of the enigmatic Long Man of Wilmington in Sussex. The White Horse has recently been re-dated and shown to be even older than its previously assigned ancient pre-Roman Iron Age* date. The most famous of these figures is perhaps also the most mysterious – the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire. Although the majority of these geoglyphs date within the last 300 years or so, there are one or two that are much older. The figures include giants, horses, crosses and regimental badges. There are 56 hill figures scattered around England, with the vast majority on the chalk downlands of the country’s southern counties. The cutting of huge figures or ‘geoglyphs’ into the earth of English hillsides has taken place for more than 3,000 years. You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13 which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
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