Who Created the Cerne Abbas Giant?

The Giant and His Prominent Feature

He's 180 feet tall, stark naked, and sports a very large erection. The Cerne Abbas Giant is a geoglyph carved into a chalk hillside with an origin that has puzzled archeologists for decades.

The Mystery of Geoglyphs

All over the world, civilizations have left behind images sculpted into the Earth's landscapes.

Perhaps, the most famous of these are the Nazca lines in Peru. They are not, as author Erich von Däniken claimed, the work of visitors from outer space, but more likely motifs of a religious nature created by people who were definitely human. Still, a large degree of mystery surrounds these and other geoglyphs.

The people who made these designs left no written record of why they did so and that leaves archeologists with nothing but educated guesses. Mostly, these centre around religious observances, territorial markers, astronomical charts, pilgrimage guides, but probably not pranks.

The Cerne Abbas giant has been a mystery for centuries and might be, in part, a practical joke..

How to Make a Geoglyph

Chalk downs stretch across southern England; among them the Purbeck Hills in Dorset. It's here that someone decided to etch the figure of a man into a hillside.

Known in the local pub, appropriately called The Giant, as the Rude Man, Cerne Abbas's tourist attraction is created by exposing chalk. The turf covering the chalk substrate was cut away and then backfilled with crushed chalk. That chalk is replenished from time to time to ensure the giant looks his best.

There is evidence that the figure has been tampered with over the years. He once had a cloak or animal skin draped over this left arm, with a severed head nearby. The first written evidence of his existence did not appear until 1694 when church records detail the spending of three shillings “for repaireing of ye Giant.”

In his right hand, the giant carries what seems to be a massive club. He is entirely nude and it's impossible not to notice that he has exaggerated evidence of sexual arousal.

But, what's this? There's evidence that in 1908 the rude man was tinkered with and his member enlarged, and this was long before enhancement pills were available on the internet.

In fact, sophisticated scans have shown he was originally sculpted without any procreative equipment at all.

Who Created the Giant?

One school of thought had the giant carved out of the hillside in prehistoric times. For a long time, the assertion was that it was Bronze Age or Iron Age, putting its birth as much as 4,000 years in the past.

In 1764, an antiquarian named William Stukeley opined that the figure's club was suggestive of Hercules, so that placed him during the time of the Roman occupation of Britain from 43 to 410 CE.

Surveys of land use in the area were carried out in the 1540s and in 1617, but no mention was made of the giant figure on the hillside. Much earlier surveys referenced the Uffington White Horse that is 95 miles north of Cerne Abbas. Had the giant's outline been grown over with weeds? Or, had he not been created yet?

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A more recent and amusing origin has been suggested; that it is a mocking depiction of Oliver Cromwell. The puritanical Cromwell led the rebellion against the monarchy in the middle of the 17th century, and ruled England harshly from 1653 to 1658.

Lord Holles, the local landowner, had fallen out with Cromwell, so the story goes, and had ordered a lampooning effigy to be carved into the hillside on his estate. There had been other images of Cromwell as a club-wielding, naked Hercules, albeit with a piece of cloth tastefully masking his nether regions.

So, the learned opinion was that the Cerne Abbas Giant was etched into the hillside somewhere between 4,000 and 350 years ago. Science came to the rescue and slightly tarnished a few academic reputations.

Dating the Cerne Abbas Giant

In 2019, a process called optically stimulated luminescence was called in to establish when the giant was carved.

Using nuclear radiation, this allows scientists to study when a sample of sediment was last exposed to sunlight. The result of this examination is that the giant was cut at sometime between 700 and 1100 of the Christian Era, a time period no archeologists had picked as likely.

So, if it's of Saxon origin why was it not mentioned in the surveys that came later? The plot thickened with the discovery of tiny snail shells on the site that date to the 13th and 14th centuries.

Archaeologist Martin Papworth is with the National Trust that owns the site. His theory is that Saxons cut the giant, then it was abandoned and grassed over before being rediscovered and renovated in the medieval period.

Papworth suggests it was created by pagans who worshipped their god Helith or Helis to mock a Benedictine monastery that was founded in 987 in Cerne Abbas.

However, villagers converted to Christianity, Helith was kicked to the curb, and the giant forgotten. This is just a theory—certainly, a plausible one—but then so was the notion that the giant was of prehistoric origin.

It seems the Cerne Abbas Giant will keep archeologists in gainful employment for years to come.

Bonus Factoids

• The giant's most prominent feature leads, obviously, to speculation that he is a fertility god. The sixth Marquess of Bath, Henry Frederick Thynne, certainly thought so. In the 1980s, he and his wife were having difficulty conceiving a child so they visited the giant. Later, Lord Bath told a reporter, “We were very much in the dark about what he could do. I explained the problem and sat on him.” Ten months later, Silvy Cerne Thynne was born; her godfather was listed as G. Cerne.
• To the east of Cerne Abbas, in Sussex, another chalk-cut giant towers over a hillside. The Long Man of Wilmington is 226 feet tall but lacks the display of genitalia that makes his cousin so famous.
• Improbably, there's a kiwi carved into a chalk hillside near Salisbury Plain in England. The depiction of the flightless bird was created by New Zealand soldiers in 1919. They were stationed at Bulford Camp nearby awaiting repatriation to their home following World War I.

Sources

• “Where to See Five of the Planet’s Most Mysterious Geoglyphs.” Jennifer Nalewicki, Smithsonian Magazine, April 20, 2017.
• “Chalk Hill Figures.” Ellen Castelow, historic-uk.com, June 6, 2015
• “The Mysterious Origins of the Cerne Abbas Giant.” Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker, May 12, 2021.
• “Cerne Abbas Giant Age Revealed by Scientists.” BBC, May 12, 2021.
• “Scholars Are One Step Closer to Solving the Mystery of an Enormous Chalk Figure.” David Kindy, Smithsonian Magazine, May 13, 2021.

This content is accurate and true to the best of the author’s knowledge and is not meant to substitute for formal and individualized advice from a qualified professional.

© 2023 Rupert Taylor