cerne giant festival
Dorset
The Giant stands watch over acres of undulating hills and fertile , water-fed,
green valleys. No one knows how old he is. He has defied archaeology, and in the
end it comes down to which sorts of evidence one places one’s faith in …
although the consensus is that he was put there as some sort of message. Those
who place their faith in the written word point out that the first (surviving)
written evidence of the Giant is in the Churchwardens’ accounts of 1694 (“for
repairing ye Giant, 3 shillings”). They favour the theory that he was created as
a political lampoon of Cromwell by Denzel Holles, who owned the land at the
time. Others note the Giant’s similarity to Hercules and imagine Roman soldiers
creating him as a statement, perhaps in a similar way to how regimental badges
were created on Salisbury Plain during WW1. If you talk to those who’ve lived
here for generations – who remember running around his outline as a child or
playing a sort of hopscotch between the parts of his tackle, he is prehistoric.
More recently Peter Knight has examined archaeoastronomical alignments and came
to the conclusion he is Iron Age, created not long before the Roman invasion.
