Red Horse of Tysoe

The Red Horse of Tysoe was a great hill figure cut into the red clay of the escarpment below Edge Hill in south Warwickshire, giving its name to the Vale of the Red Horse that stretches beneath it. The earliest description comes from William Camden's Britannia of 1607, which notes 'the shape of a horse cut out in a red hill by the country people, hard by Pillerton'; in its original form the figure was a galloping horse some 285 feet long and 95 feet high — comparable in scale to the white horses of Wiltshire. William Dugdale, writing in 1656, recorded that the figure was 'yearly scoured by a Freeholder in this Lordship, who holds certain lands there by that service' — maintenance of the horse was, quite literally, the rent owed on the land.

Two rival explanations have grown up around the horse's origins. The Reverend Francis Wise argued that the annual scouring took place on Palm Sunday in commemoration of Richard Neville, the 16th Earl of Warwick — 'Warwick the Kingmaker' — and his part in the Battle of Towton in 1461, though the Reverend William Asplin disputed the connection. An older possibility lies in the parish name itself: 'Tysoe' may derive from 'Tiw's hoh', a spur of land dedicated to Tiw, the Anglo-Saxon god of war, raising the possibility that a horse has marked this hillside since pagan Saxon times, long before any horse cut for a medieval earl.

The Red Horse did not survive into the modern era. Around the time of the Enclosure Acts in the 1790s, an innkeeper named Simon Nicholls ploughed up the original 'Great Horse' — and, finding that the loss of the horse-scouring fair was costing him trade, promptly cut a smaller replacement nearby. Over the centuries at least five different horse figures appeared in the vale, the last vanishing under planted trees by around 1910–14. Aerial surveys and excavations in the 1960s rediscovered traces of the original Great Horse beneath the soil, confirming Camden's account of its size — a ghost of a hill figure that gave an entire valley its name, long after the horse itself had disappeared.