ANCIENT myth and magic collide in Horse, an experimental new work by poet Katrina Porteous and composer Peter Zinovieff, as Tamzin Lewislearns.

THE Uffington White Horse, near Oxford, is a mysterious and slightly controversial beast. After much theorising, archaeologists have concluded the leaping figure is 3,000 years old. But what was it created for? And is it even a horse?

Fertile ground then for a poet interested in history, myth and landscape. Katrina Porteous, who lives at Beadnell in Northumberland, has spent a year collaborating with her friend Peter Zinovieff on a sound piece commissioned by BBC Radio 3.

Horse will premiere at this weekend’s Free Thinking Festival of Ideas at The Sage Gateshead, which is bringing a host of big names to the venue including Foreign Secretary William Hague, author Margaret Drabble, psychotherapist Susie Orbach and – as Thinker-in-Residence – the Rev Dr Giles Fraser who recently resigned from his post at St Paul’s Cathedral.

Katrina explains she was inspired by artist Mark Wallinger’s proposal for a monumental white horse which won an Angel of the South competition in 2009.

“I saw the proposal, which is very realistic, and I thought the horse looked very static,” she says. “I decided to do a piece about the spirit of a horse rather than its appearance.

“This made me remember the Uffington horse from many years ago. It doesn’t look much like a horse but it does look like the spirit of a horse.”

Katrina first visited the late Bronze Age steed, which lies near prehistoric track The Ridgeway on the Berkshire Downs, as a child.

She says: “I was obsessed with horses, like many little girls, and, aged seven, I begged my parents to go on a school trip to see the Uffington horse. When I saw it I was very disappointed.”

Returning to Uffington as an adult, her views of the stylised horse were rather different. Katrina says: “It’s a very dramatic and ancient landscape and in front of the horse is a huge bowl, like a natural auditorium.

“Above the horse, The Ridgeway is high and steep. The line between the land and sky must have been important to ancient people.”

No one knows the purpose of the horse but as it can only be seen fully from the air it was possibly a sign to ancient gods. Over the years, experts have debated whether it is a horse at all, with speculation that it is actually meant to be a dragon or a dog.

Around the horse are a host of other ancient sites, including an Iron Age hill fort, Dragon Hill, where St George was said to have slain the dragon, and Wayland’s Smithy, a Neolithic burial chamber named after the Saxon god of metal-working.

So the area is awash with myth and legend which have inspired Katrina’s words for Horse. And she has been equally inspired by Peter Zinovieff, who invented a synthesizer in the late 1960s that was used by prog-rock bands including Pink Floyd.

Katrina says: “For this piece he recorded the sound of a ferry in Cornwall, which is drawn across an estuary by chains. He sent his recordings to me and his sounds became part of the poems. All the music has grown out of his recordings.”

She adds: “The idea of Horse was to suggest travelling back though layer upon layer of history.”

Horse is being performed by Katrina, Peter and actor Steve Robertson at 7.30pm tomorrow in Hall Two of The Sage Gateshead. It will be broadcast on November 26 at 9pm in Between the Ears on BBC Radio 3. Visit www.thesagegateshead.org