The outline of an enigmatic giant some 235ft tall occupies the steep north slope of Windover Hill, near Wilmington in East Sussex. It is known as the ‘Long Man of Wilmington’, and key questions about this figure – when, who, and why? – have preoccupied me for 40 years. The blank image leaves us guessing who it is supposed to represent. People have often assumed that the Long Man is ancient, and in 1983, when I reviewed the available theories, the presence nearby of flint mines and two long barrows suggested to me that a Neolithic origin was possible, although the figure itself offered very little evidence. The stretching of the figure (making it easier to read from ground level) implied a modern origin, though, and once an early modern origin had been attributed to the Cerne Abbas Giant – another towering hill figure, this time in Dorset – it became fashionable to see the Long Man in the same light.
These discussions took shape in the 1980s, when the ‘absence of evidence’ argument was used to promote a late origin for the Cerne Giant – at that time, the earliest known drawings of both figures dated from the mid-1760s – and since then some historians and archaeologists have striven to prove that both giants are early modern in date. Stylistic and constructional differences between the figures suggest that they were made at different times for different purposes, though, and an early modern date for one does not prove an early modern date for the other. Further evidence continues to emerge: in the 1990s, a drawing of the Long Man dating to 1710 was discovered, while the earliest record of the Cerne Giant was trumped when Vivian Vale discovered a 1694 mention of repairs to the hill figure. (CA 365 has more on recent research at Cerne Abbas.) The dates are gradually being pushed back – and now forensic dating techniques have pushed them back even further.
From Roman pavement to Tudor brick
In the 1990s, I kept finding small weathered fragments of orange brick close to the outline of the Long Man. I suspected that they were pieces of the ‘Roman pavement’ under the grass that was described in the 18th century – the fabric certainly looked like Roman brick – and two other pieces found on the outline by Eric Holden in 1969 had been tentatively identified by Barry Cunliffe as Roman. When I examined both Holden’s and my own samples under a microscope they looked very similar, and in 2002 I sent one of my brick fragments for thermoluminescence (TL) dating.
