I was born in Wiltshire, and I have lived in the county for the majority of my life. I have a very long ancestry here – I can trace my ancestry back over 400 years in just one town. (And it certainly goes back further than that – 400 years is just what I’ve been able to trace.) Various branches of the family tree spread out across the county.
There is, if you didn’t know, an official flag of Wiltshire. All (or at least most – I haven’t checked) of the English counties have flags. The Wiltshire one was designed in the 2000s by Mike Prior. I’m not overly enthusiastic about the design: curved green and white stripes, with a green circle in the middle and a golden great bustard (a bird native to Wiltshire) on top. (I like the great bustard, but I just don’t quite like the shapes in the rest of it.)
I’ve known for a while that there has been an alternate flag design – an unofficial one. It features a white horse on a field of green. It is a reference to the many white horse figures that can be seen on hillsides throughout the county – Wiltshire has the most white horses of any county. This seems like a much more fitting symbol of the county than stripes and the great bustard. (Of course, Wiltshire doesn’t have the Uffington White Horse figure – the original, prehistoric white horse figure, which is about 2000-3000 years old. That’s in Oxfordshire, in the Vale of the White Horse. But that hill figure is less than 10 miles away from the border of Wiltshire – the Vale of the White Horse itself bordering Wiltshire, of course.)
This unofficial white horse flag was apparently also designed in the 2000s, by Chris Fear. While I like the idea of a flag of Wiltshire featuring a white horse, I’m not too enthusiastic about this specific design either. It’s based on the Cherhill White Horse – which is a white horse hill figure that’s located in the county. But that hill figure looks a little peculiar – in fact it almost looks more like a deer than a horse. Symbolism is extremely important (in flags, but also in anything artistic), but I think a bit of creative licence is also valuable in order to make a design that’s really distinctive (and, with luck, iconic).
So recently I’ve been thinking: why not make a new design? A new design of a white horse on a green field, but one which is a bit more … horsey – and, dare I say, dramatic … expressive …
It’s taken me a while to get round to doing it, but now I’ve done it, and the design is below.
I found this very difficult to do. There were many choices to be made when making the design. What pose should the horse be in? How stylised should the design be? How detailed should it be? What colour green should I use?
I decided to have the horse running. Most of the hill figures show the horse standing, but I think that’s not quite dramatic or exciting enough for a flag. A horse running looks quite majestic.
Flag design – particularly flag design for English counties – is connected to, or even part of, heraldry. Heraldry has its own conventions and style. When drawing animals in heraldry (well, when drawing anything, really), there’s a certain style to how its drawn. It might have been nice to do that here, but I’m not sufficiently well versed in that style to be able to do it. In fact, I’m not sufficiently well versed in any style to be able to make a stylised illustration. So the design is very literal, and flat. There’s a danger that that can make something look a bit corporate (and looking corporate must be avoided at all costs), but I think the result is a simplicity that is easy to recognise, and easy to replicate. I have heard that a good flag design should be something that a child could draw from memory by hand.
Lots of flags nowadays – particularly country flags – have mathematical specifications for how they should look. It’s easy to see why countries do this – if the design is specified mathematically, there can be no arguments about whether any one copy of the flag is correct. Doing this is much easier with geometric designs, of course – it’s quite easy to do this with the Flag of England, the Flag of Scotland, the Union Jack, and countless others. But this kind of mathematical specification is somewhat at odds with traditional heraldry. In traditional heraldry, figures and shapes are defined descriptively, not mathematically, and colours are certainly not defined in a universal way. The design is allowed to vary. With the design above, any number of small changes could be made to the outline of the horse without it looking substantially different, so this kind of flag naturally resists mathematical definition. In some ways that’s a good thing – it puts the flag a bit more in line with traditional heraldry – but in some ways its a bad thing – it is hard (or impossible) to replicate the design exactly unless you have the original.
The horse figure on the flag is, of course, pure white. Choosing a green was difficult. When you really get into it, green is actually quite a difficult colour. There are so many different hues and shades of green, and they all carry with them their own connections, meanings, and moods. The exact green that I’ve chosen here has a hue of 150, a saturation of 35, and a lightness of 25. That makes it a bluish green (which I generally prefer myself, but which I think also has a very classic look to it). To me it is reminiscent of wet grass or foliage in autumn or winter. It is a deep, retreating green suitable for one of the most rural counties in the country.
While I like this design, I am not entirely convinced that it is what I intended when I set out on this project. Perhaps I would prefer something different? Perhaps there are slight refinements that I could have made, but which I overlooked? I can spend forever and a day contemplating designs like this and still not come to any conclusions about them. So rather than have this thing sit on my computer for years while I ponder it, I’m just going to label this one ‘Version 1’, and if I decide that actually I want to do something differently, I’ll come back later and do a version 2, version 3, and so on.
I do not intend for this flag to necessarily replace the existing official flag. I simply wanted to have the design, and allow other people to have it as well. How can we know what flag design we really want unless we have some options to choose between? I’m a huge fan of having unofficial versions of things that exist alongside the official versions – unofficial national anthems (like Rule, Britannia! and Land of Hope and Glory), unofficial national symbols – and in this case unofficial flags. We don’t just have to have one thing, the official thing.
So this is Version 1. I may come back later and make some different versions, but I think this version is simple, yet elegant, and majestic – distinctive, easily recognisable, and easy to like. I’ll get a few made for myself.
(Lots of information can be found on the existing official and unofficial flags here: https://britishcountyflags.com/2013/07/31/wiltshire-flag/ .)