Interesting. The thing about the 1776 drawing is that it looks to me as if the artist has drawn a representative horse rather than necessarily what he actually saw.

Channel 4 vandalism? I don't know what you refer to. The Aubrey Manning programme covered recent archaeological research at Uffington and Wilmington. The result indicated that Uffington was nearly 3,000 years old. You can choose to reject that of course, but it convinced me. If a hill figure was first cut 3,000 years ago then I find it hard to believe that it has survived unchanged. Over cutting would make the lines fatter rather than thinner as more grass would be cut away each time it was tidied up. Infrequent cutting would make the lines thinner as the chalk was gradually grassed over. In either case, the design would have changed. So what did the original 3,000 year old design look like? It seems unreasonable to believe that it resembled the highly naturalistic horses of recent centuries. Much more reasonable to assume that it was similiar to the so called "Celtic" designs that have survived in the form of metalwork ornamentation, the model bronze horses and votive chariots of Denmark and elsewhwere and the later coinage of the Iron Age. The coin designs show wildly galloping horses with legs separated from their bodies. The style is identical. Either the Uffington Horse is a remarkable survival of Bronze Age/Iron Age art or it is a much later reconstruction of the same Iron Age art. I shall continue to enjoy it for what it is - a remarkable work of art.