Make sure you don’t skip these South of England art and history highlights

At a gallop

Uffington White Horse, Oxfordshire

Every August bank holiday, a troop of eager volunteers descends on the Uffington White Horse, 10 miles east of Swindon, for a spot of weeding and whitening. Rechalking the 360ft-long artwork, carefully cut into the side of a chalk hill, has been happening every few years since it was made 3,000 years ago. During wars, plagues and drought, the White Horse has continued to gallop across the landscape, its slender body, beak-like mouth and streaming tail slowly changing shape over the centuries. Why was the Uffington White Horse made? No one knows. It is located close to an Iron Age hill fort, but may pre-date it. Did it define territory or was it an ancient fertility symbol? Or did it venerate the horses that were once thought to pull the sun across the sky?

A stitch in time

Bayeux Tapestry Victorian copy, Reading Museum, Berkshire

Forever and beyond

Alice de la Pole’s cadaver tomb, Ewelme Church, Ewelme, Oxfordshire

Alice de la Pole’s tomb fits snugly between the altar and a side chapel in the church in Ewelme, a small village in Oxfordshire. It was completed in about 1475 and at first glance seems like a regular alabaster tomb that you might find in any provincial church. Peer through the architectural dais on which her effigy rests, however, and you will perceive a second skeletal figure. Known as a cadaver tomb, this is the only one of its kind featuring a woman in Britain. De La Pole was Geoffrey Chaucer’s granddaughter and a significant and well-connected patron of the Arts. Whereas her pious effigy is carried up to Heaven by angels, the figure beneath is shown in a state of desiccation. Her hair runs free and her limbs are wizened. Gone is her wimple and coronet — now she appears half-dressed in a shroud, her feet bare and bony. Mortality is real, it seems to say, but your spirit can live forever in Heaven.

Into the wood

The Carved Room, Grinling Gibbons, Petworth House, West Sussex

The highlight of any tour of Petworth House is the Carved Room by Grinling Gibbons. Not only does it house a studio copy of Holbein’s Henry VIII, but it is decorated in gravity-defying swags and musical still lifes carved from limewood. Horace Walpole described it as ‘the most superb monument of his skill’. It was installed in the 1690s by the 6th Duke and Duchess of Somerset and was originally half the size. A century later, the space was expanded by the 3rd Earl of Egremont to create a grand dining room. He painted the panelling white behind the limewood carvings and commissioned four Turner landscapes of his parkland and investment projects (Brighton’s Chain Pier and the Chichester canal) to hang under the portraits.

Sailing the seven seas

The James Cook collection, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford

You must work hard to find the 18th-century James Cook collection in the Pitt Rivers Museum. First, you need to locate the museum itself through an archway at the back of the central hall in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Then, you must navigate a maze of glass cases to access the first-floor balcony. There, in a single case, the cultural artefacts gathered by Capt James Cook on his three world voyages are clustered together. There are sculptures taken from the prows of canoes, imposing ceremonial robes, bundles of bark cloth and green nephrite pendants with circular shell eyes. Although there may have been little sense of the historical and contextual importance of such artefacts from Polynesia, New Zealand and Australia when they were first exhibited, they nevertheless inspired 20th-century Modernist sculptors in Britain, including Henry Moore and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska.

Pretty as a picture

Dimbola Museum and Galleries, Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight

Brick by brick

The Watts Chapel, Mary Watts, Compton, Surrey

You may first decide to visit the Watts Artists’ Village near Guildford, Surrey, to see the purpose-built gallery of G. F. Watts, a hugely successful Victorian painter. Or you may choose to walk around the family home, Limnerslease, where pulleys in Watts’s studio allowed vast canvases to be winched up and down. However, the highlight of your tour may well be the Watts Chapel, built by his wife, Mary, between 1895 and 1904. She had trained at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and was 32 years his junior — his success could have been intimidating, but she found her own furrow as an artist. She built the circular mortuary chapel collaboratively, teaching 70 local volunteers how to make terracotta bricks using intricate moulds. The exterior features complex Celtic ribbonwork (a nod to her Scottish ancestry), but the interior explodes in a riot of line and colour. Red, purple and green angels throng the walls, as pronounced vines (made from gilded gesso) snake towards the sky.

Bohemian Haunt

Charleston, West Firle, East Sussex

Memories of war

Stanley Spencer murals, Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, Hampshire

Stanley Spencer is most often associated with Cookham, the Berkshire village where he spent his childhood and much of his career. In 1927, however, he embarked on a series of paintings for the Sandham Memorial Chapel on the outskirts of Burghclere, a project that would occupy him for five years. This private chapel was commissioned by John and Mary Behrend and dedicated to Mary’s brother Harry, who had died of an illness contracted during the First World War. Both Harry and Spencer had served in Thessaloniki, Greece. The latter had worked as a medical orderly before enlisting in the infantry and he drew on his experiences of service for this task. His paintings fill the entire chapel, culminating in a vast depiction of dead soldiers rising from graves to hand white crosses to Christ on the East Wall. Others feature scenes of war from behind the front line — wounded soldiers arriving at hospitals, patients being cleaned, laundry washed and tea urns filled.

Home is where the art is

Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, St Ives, Cornwall