This is happening again in 2020.
Last year I spent a couple of hours bashing an ancient monument with a hammer, and there’s a chance to do it again.
The Uffington White Horse, an iron-age era hill figure formed from deep trenches cut into the Oxfordshire countryside and filled with white chalk needs re-chalking.
You’ll be given a hammer and a bucket of chalk and asked to bash the chalk into the monument to give it a fresh clean look.
An hour or so sitting on the grassy slopes, chatting away and bashing an ancient monument with hammers. What a curiously perfect way to spend some time. It’s also oddly very very relaxing, the tap tapping away at the chalk to create that perfect porcelain surface as all the worries of the weeks fade away.
There will be two chalking weekends this year — 6th-7th July and 25th-26th August.
The chalking is available every 1/2 hour from 10am to 4pm. Just turn up on the day and have a go. If you want to bring a group, then best to contact them in advance though.
It’s your chance to be the last in the long lineage of people who have been cleaning the Uffington Horse for thousands of years, and also pointed up at the Uffington Horse to say “we did that”.
If bashing stones hasn’t exhausted you, then you might want to take a detour to nearby Ashdown House, but only on the Saturdays, and also nearby is the curious blowing stone.
Tom Scott also turned up for a bit of a bash.
Sounds a good way to relieve stress! Thinking of all the people you’d like to whack with a hammer whilst doing it!