So we wheezed our way up the windy hill to see the legendary White Horse near Uffington, an elegant ancient horse motif cut into the Wessex chalk uplands.

When we got there, two things immediately struck us.

First, the Horse is not obvious.

All you can see are slender lines of chalky areas surrounded by grass. The Horse is wonderful if you are high in the sky, otherwise pretty hopeless. Odd that our distant ancestors did not cut the figure into a steeply sloping area just below, where one would have seen it from on high as well as from a nearby rise. Bit of a Bronze Age failure to think sensibly about the future tourist industry?

Second, a group of trans-Atlantic-sounding New Age tourists of all known genders were perched on the hillside above the Horse. They were listening intently to a guide explaining how the CIA had funded America’s scary 1950s alien invasion movies aiming to create a national mood of fear both of other nations and of Otherness in general. And the Catholic Church had for centuries whipped up fear of Nature’s Spirituality, or somesuch.

Well, we never knew all that.

So, back down we went. All the wiser.