ENGLISH Heritage hopes that the latest clean of the Westbury White Horse will keep the iconic landmark clean and back to its gleaming white for the next five to ten years.
Local people had been asking for the White Horse to be cleaned for over a year now but due to the drought last year the cleaning had to be postponed. English Heritage organised for cleaners to abseil down the 180ft tall landmark this month, with the majority of the horse now cleaned and repainted white.
Win Scutt, the senior properties curator at English Heritage, says that the growth of algae of the White Horse makes the task to keep the landmark clean and white more difficult. “The specialist paint that we are using, called Keim, was supposed to last forever but actually we have found that we’ve cleaned in 2011, 2016, 2018 and 2022 as the growth of the algae that stems from the runoff from the fields above is impossible to fight really,” he explained.
“The White Horse will most likely go grey gradually, but we are hoping that we won’t have to clean and paint it for another five to ten years. This is an incredibly expensive process though – the paint alone costs £25,000; then you have the operative costs, equipment and the cost of bringing the water up which adds to the cost significantly. We are a charity and we aren’t funded by the government so we rely on donations which means we can’t clean as often as we would like.
“The entire cleaning process is split into three phases and it will take about eight weeks in total. Firstly, we will clean the surface using a process called ThermaTech cleaning, which is like jet washing but with steam, then we will clean out all the joints which are full of weeds at the moment and then finally we paint it white
“This is a very expensive and highly technical process which is being done by Sally Strachey Historic Conservation. It would have been lovely to use volunteers and we’ve had lots of offers, but the only way we can use volunteers (due to safety reasons) is as explainers who come up here to explain to the public what we are doing and talk about the history of the White Horse.”
When asked if the process would have been easier if the White Horse remained as chalk, Win explained, “Chalk surfaces seem to be more resilient; however it would probably cost millions to remove the concrete and make it chalk. That decision to change the surface was made back in 1957 and it does make sense in some ways as the surface is very steep – it is the steepest of all the white horses so is some ways now it is easier to clean.”
Local records suggest that the White Horse was originally cut in the late 1600s, probably to commemorate the Battle of Ethandun, thought to have taken place at Bratton Camp in AD 878 when King Alfred defeated the Vikings.
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