Oxford and the White Horse

A short flight from the optimistically named ‘London Oxford Airport’ (still officially Kidlington Airfield) to the Uffington White Horse in a gold DA62


‘London Oxford Airport’ or EGTK to Flight Sim buffs


Gold DA62! (livery can be downloaded from https://www.msfsaddons.org/liveries/tiagos-pack)


Not quite the city of dreaming spires in FS2020 but still recognisably a mid-size historic British city. You can make out a cricket pitch and all those buildings with courtyards which are university buildings with their quadrangles.


Classic English countryside near Abingdon as I adopt a heading I worked out for Oxford city centre to the White Horse.


Didn’t appreciate just how short this trip was. In no time at all I’m approaching Wantage, the nearest town to the horse.


Wantage is a decently-sized town popular with commuters, as evidenced by the amount of new housing


Development continues to the west of Wantage, though the real market town’s high street isn’t as full of tall concrete buildings as the AI things. I hope they’re able to improve the AI in the future. Behind the town a solar power farm can be seen (the light blue/green coloured field)


RAF Grove just outside Wantage. An airfield which was in use between 1942 and 1946. The outline of the runways in the fields is just about discernible still.


The Berkshire Downs, a low escarpment running across this part of the country. Just about visible soon after take-off they aren’t very high but as I get closer they form more of a landmark and I turn to follow them, knowing the White Horse will be in the side of them


X marks the spot. I’m not sure what the spot is, but it looks like the remains of something designed to be seen from the air, probably related to the nearby RAF bases during wartime.


Just south of the village of Uffington, a white horse has been carved into the chalk hillside. Of all the figures scoured into the landscape of the chalklands of the South, this is the one most verifiably ancient. The only reasons it still exists is regular maintenance and other figures previously believed to be ancient have been found to actually be much more recent.


Coming closer for a better look


Just on the hill above the horse is Uffington Castle, actually a prehistoric hill-fort. It’s not clear what the relationship is with the horse. Prehistory is a deceptively long time-period, not as folk may assume, an era of similar length to classical or mediaeval history. Two prehistoric monuments could easy turn out to date from thousands of years apart and be built by very different people.

I planned to head onwards to the Cerne Abbas Giant and perhaps just explore the ancient (or fake ancient) hill figures of Southern England. Unfortunately on unpausing the plane immediately stalled and dropped out of the sky, leaving a nasty crater in a scheduled ancient monument. This is something I’ve seen happening to youtubers too so may be a bug, maybe it’s something to do with the fact that I was in live-pause and then hit ‘real pause’ for a bit.

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