The name "Vale of White Horse" predates the present-day local authority district, having been described, for example, in Daniel Defoe's 1748 travel account A Tour thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain.

[3] Traditionally, the Vale has been understood to cover an area wider than the present-day local authority district, stretching from Buscot, in the west, to Streatley, in the east.

The area has been long settled as a productive fertile chalklands above well-drained clay valleys, and well-farmed with many small woodlands and hills between the Berkshire Downs and the River Thames on its north and east sides.

The local government district was formed as part of the 1974 re-organisation, taking in three small Berkshire towns – in descending size order Abingdon, Faringdon and Wantage – and the surrounding rural parishes.

It is almost flat and well wooded, its green meadows and foliage contrasting richly with the bald summits of the Berkshire Downs, which flank it on the south.

To the north, a low ridge separates it from the upper Thames Valley, holding back the soft Jurassic sedimentary and Cretaceous deposits (Greensand, Gault and Kimmeridge Clay) behind a hard corallian limestone escarpment ridge, in what is technically a hanging valley; but local usage sometimes extends the vale to cover all the ground between the Cotswolds (on the north) and the Berkshire Downs.

In its northern flank, just below the summit, a gigantic figure of a horse is cut, consisting of deep trenches filled with crushed white chalk.

Tradition asserted it to be the monument of a victory over the Danes by King Alfred, who was born at Wantage, but the site of the Battle of Ashdown (871 CE) has been variously located.

The Vale as a whole appears at the beginning of Tom Brown's Schooldays, as the scene of innocent Saxon boyhood adventures, before the eponymous hero is sent away to school at Rugby.

The legend is elaborated, and the smith appears as a character, in Sir Walter Scott's novel Kenilworth, and in Rudyard Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill.

It travels along the crest of the hills, far above what would then have been marshy lowlands or forests, continuing Icknield Street, from the Chilterns to Goring and Streatley on the River Thames.

At the foot of the hills, not far east of the Horse, is preserved the so-called Blowing Stone of Kingston Lisle, a mass of sandstone (a sarsen) pierced with holes in such a way that, when blown like a trumpet, it produces a loud note.

With the closure of British Leyland's long-established MG works at Abingdon in 1980,[7] there is no motor industry, apart from some specialist car makers and component factories.