ANYONE looking towards the Osmington White Horse recently will have seen loads of people on the hillside, hovering helicopters and a significant change in the appearance of King George III and his charger.

All this activity has been part of the restoration project led by the Osmington Society, and incorporating county and district councils, the Dorset AONB partnership and English Heritage, with the aim of restoring the 200-year-old figure to a condition as close as possible to its original state before the advent of the 2012 Olympics.

The project has been at work for over a year, with assistance from Oxford Archaeology, researching the horse’s original appearance, working out how best to restore it, and obtaining the necessary permissions and funding support. An early conclusion was that the first manual work needed was to remove about 140 tons of loose limestone chippings from earlier restoration efforts. These had slipped over time and blurred the outline of the image. This was going to need a lot of labour.

Luckily, help was at hand. As part of their Cadets in the Community initiative, the Dorset Army Cadet Force volunteered to include the task as one of their summer camp activities, with guidance and support by the Royal Engineers from the Wyke Regis Training Area. The Royal Navy also lent a hand by including help with stone removal as part of a crew training task for a helicopter of 845 Squadron from RNAS Yeovilton. Bags in which to shift the stone were donated by Aggregate Industries at the Warmwell quarries, and the landowners, Mr and Mrs Critchell, of White Horse Farm gave their full support to all the activity across their land.

As a result, there has been huge progress with this first phase of the work. Starting on July 26, teams of up to 50 young cadets at a time worked hard for four hot days clearing the chippings from almost 80% of the horse - some into bags and the rest piled at the lower edge of the figure. Their part ended on Tuesday, August 3, when the Sea King helicopter arrived to move the ten heavy bags from the top part of the site to a storage point across the valley.

The clearance phase is still not complete. The horse’s legs still need to be cleared, and the piled stone needs to be moved clear, but the Army have promised further help whenever opportunity offers until the job is done.

However, the removal of the stone is still far from being the end of the restoration task, and the white horse may continue to look a bit sick for the next few months. The next phase of the work is to mark out and frame the original outline while, at the same time, analysing what treatment will be best for revitalising and preserving the surface that has been revealed by the recent work. It then remains to apply the chosen treatment to complete the restoration. To quote the chairman of the Osmington Society and of the Restoration Group, Geoff Codd, “This restoration journey will undoubtedly be challenging, and at times unsightly, but we will be proud of the white horse image that will be beamed around the world in 2012”.

If you want to find out more about the project, and to follow its progress in detail, log on to the project website at www.osmingtonwhitehorse.info.