Red Horse of Tysoe

[3] Camden wrote: a great part of the very Vale is thereupon termed the Vale of Red Horse, of the shape of a horse cut out in a red hill by the country people, hard by Pillerton.A second mention of the Red Horse was made in 1612 by the Warwickshire poet Michael Drayton,[1] while another more explicit account was given by antiquary William Dugdale, who was given the task of recording features of interest around the country in case the Parliamentarians should seek to destroy them.

Reverend Francis Wise put forward a theory, based on local tradition, that the horse had been scoured annually on Palm Sunday to commemorate Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick's participation in the Battle of Towton,[9] while a Reverend William Asplin ridiculed Wise for his theories on this (and other) hill-figures.

[12] The third Red Horse was eventually destroyed when a Mr Simon Nicholls, the landlord of nearby inn the Sun Rising, had it ploughed up around the time of the enclosures.

A possible fifth Red Horse was cut on Spring Hill, some distance from the original site, subsequent to the cutting of the fourth, but this final version had disappeared sometime shortly after 1914, although some elderly residents interviewed in the 1960s claimed to remember having seen it.

[5] Evidence for the earlier horses was uncovered in the 1960s by local historians K. A. Carrdus and G. W. Miller using a combination of aerial and other photographs, historical research, fieldwork and soil resistivity surveys; some of their findings were published as The Red Horse of Tysoe in 1965.