Picked out in gleaming chalk on a Dorset hillside, the Cerne Abbas Giant cuts an undeniably imposing figure. Depicting a priapic nude male, it has been in the care of the National Trust for more than a century, but its origins have long been obscure. Was it created in later prehistory, like Oxfordshire’s Uffington White Horse (CA 359), or might it be much more modern, like the Tudor Long Man of Wilmington in East Sussex (CA 234 and CA 379)? In CA 365, we described a small-scale excavation that set out to learn more.
Led by Martin Papworth, the National Trust’s senior archaeologist in Wessex, this investigation saw four test-pits opened over the Giant’s outline, focusing on the crook of each elbow and the sole of each foot. There, we hoped, deposits would be deepest and would provide the best opportunity for OSL dating, which had helped to illuminate the age of the other hill-figures mentioned above. This work was undertaken in 2020 and, like so many other initiatives of the time, was stalled by COVID-19 restrictions – in our case, our samples had a lockdown of their own, stored safely but inaccessibly in a Gloucester University laboratory throughout this period. A year later, however, the results were in and, as described in CA 376, they indicated that the Giant was not prehistoric, Roman, or 17th-century, but had been created in the early medieval period. Backed up by my microanalysis of snail remains from the site, these findings represented an exciting development in our understanding of the hill-figure’s history, but one that raised as many questions as it answered, since the first-known written reference to the chalk outline does not appear until the end of the 17th century.
That is the ‘story so far’, at least in terms of what we have reported in CA – but our study of the Giant did not stop with the receipt of the OSL results in 2021. Since then, I have led further research and fieldwork to bring the project to completion, including a small ecological study in November 2023; geophysical survey in December 2023; and targeted augering in January 2024. This additional work has revealed a much more detailed picture of the Giant and how the hill-figure developed over time. In fact, this is a story of three Giants – and the white, chalk-filled outline familiar to us today may represent only a very late incarnation, essentially appearing in the 20th century.
