The Long Man

[poliphilo]

 We took Elisa to the Long Man Inn. "There aren't many other people in this world I'd buy lunch for" said Ailz.

That's three times we've been there in the last fortnight. Crazy!

One of these days when they're not as busy as they were on a Bank Holiday Monday I'll go round and identify all the little Bloomsbury name tags they've got fixed to the backs of the pews out of Berwick church. Maybe take pictures. Yesterday I found Carrington and Lytton Strachey side by side in the area labelled as "Locals Bar".

And so to the hill figure. I've been reading up about it. And to my surprise I find that the most recent theory, based on archaeology, has it pegged as late mediaeval/early modern. If this is so, then most of the more fanciful, neo-pagan ideas about it go out the window. Would people in the 15th century have been carving massive figures of Odin on their pasturelands? I think not.

But if anything the mystery deepens. If it's mediaeval/modern it becomes roughly contemporary with the other big humanoid hill figure- the Cerne Abbas Giant- and both would seem to be associated with monasteries. Cerne Abbas had an abbey and Wilmington had a priory. So what did the monks think they were doing? In neither case are we looking at Catholic iconography.

Nobody knows. Nobody is even coming up with plausible speculations.

So here "he" is. The largest representation of a human figure in Northern Europe, dominatiing his landscape, looking, "naked towards the shires"

Comments

[paserbyp]

Archaeological work performed in 2003 by Martin Bell of the University of Reading, in association with Aubrey Manning's Open University programme Landscape Mysteries, strongly suggested that the figure dates from the Early Modern period – the 16th or 17th century AD. Bell found that the slope on which the Long Man was cut had gone through a period of instability in this time, after a very long prior period of stability, suggesting that the figure was first cut then. This has opened up the possibility that the Long Man could be a Tudor or Stuart-era political satire in the manner recently posited for the Cerne Abbas giant, or possibly a religious image associated with the Reformation. The academic Ronald Hutton noted that "we can at least celebrate the fact that we have our first, apparently unequivocally, Early Modern hill figure, and historians now have to reckon with it".