The War Horse, memorial in Wakefield

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What is recorded here

The War Horse at Featherstone is a First World War memorial created for the centenary of the armistice in 2018. Its great working horse honours 353 townspeople who died and the animals drawn into the conflict. The sculpture grew from local research and stands beside a wood where one tree was planted for each of the town's dead.

Why it was made

Featherstone commissioned the memorial to mark one hundred years since the end of the First World War and to give the town a lasting place for remembrance and reflection.

People and events

Ten years of local research for the book Featherstone in the First World War led to school work, a commemorative wood and finally the sculpture unveiled in 2018.

How it worked

A £50,000 community grant paid for artists Cod Steaks to shape a powerful Yorkshire working horse, linking the town's miners and labouring past with wartime service.

What remains

The large horse stands at Mill Pond Meadow in a nature reserve, near 353 trees planted in 2014, one for every Featherstone resident lost in the war.

Why it mattered

The memorial joins named human loss, the service of working animals and present-day community use in one exact landscape rather than treating remembrance as a distant event.