A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside. Johnny Scott
on Firle Beacon, in Sussex, now looking more like a small ear of corn or a strange weapon than a human figure, whose existence can only be seen by infrared photography. What is so remarkable about the Uffington Horse is that for over thirty centuries whenever the turf looked like growing over it the local people have always cleared it away. Long after the original architects had passed on and whatever religious, totemic or cultural significance attached to the carving had been forgotten, successive generations have preserved the carving through all vicissitudes, simply because they liked having the horse on their hill and felt it looked better with it, rather than without it.
Some hill figures have been resurrected by nineteenth-and twentieth-century archaeologists – whose enthusiasm has almost certainly changed the original outlines. The Long Man of Wilmington is one, a familiar figure to me after my father moved from Cowden to Eckington Manor, in the village of Ripe, overlooking the broad sweep of the South downs in Sussex. The Long Man of Wilmington, or the Wilmington Giant, is a 70-metre-high figure holding what appear to be two staves on either side of him, cut into the downland turf on the slope of Windover Hill, between two spurs of lands that face north towards the weald. He is one of the largest such representations of a man anywhere in the world, beaten only by the Attacama Giant in Chile.
The origins of the Long Man have been the subject of endless debate, ranging from a heretical image carved by a secret occult sect of the monks of Wilmington Priory during the Middle Ages; a Celtic sun god opening the dawn portals and letting the ripening light of spring flood through, a Roman standard bearer, or a deeply symbolic prehistoric fertility symbol. Adherents to this line of thought maintain the Long Man is a reversed version of the priapic Cerne Abbas Giant and that the slope on which the old boy has been carved resembles a vulva. There is also a relatively recent theory which claims the Long Man is a sixteenth-century fake, based on carbon dating chalk rubble washed down to the foot of Windover Hill. In my view, this lacks about as much credibility as some of the more ludicrous speculation about the carving’s conception. I have no doubt that the Long Man was made by the late Bronze or early Iron Age tribesmen who occupied a substantial settlement on the summit of Windover Hill. This area is a rich source of archaeological remains, with numerous impressive high-status burial sites from different ages, lynchets or earth banks created by Celtic farming and several flint mines. Although flint was of principal importance to Neolithic people, it continued to be highly valued during successive periods of history.
THE EARLIEST-KNOWN SKETCH OF THE LONG MAN DATES FROM 1710 WHEN A SURVEYOR, JOHN ROWLEY, WAS HIRED TO MAP THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE’S SUSSEX ESTATES. ROWLEY’S DRAWING SHOWS THE LANKY MAN, LONE MAN OR GREEN MAN, AS HE WAS KNOWN LOCALLY THEN, AS A FAINT, FIZZY OUTLINE ON THE SWARD WITH A CONICAL HEAD AND BULGES WHERE HIS EARS SHOULD BE.
The earliest-known sketch of the Long Man dates from 1710 when a surveyor, John Rowley, was hired to map the Duke of Devonshire’s Sussex estates. Rowley’s drawing shows the Lanky Man, Lone Man or Green Man, as he was known locally then, as a faint, fizzy outline on the sward with a conical head and bulges where his ears should be. He is forward facing, with eyes, nose and mouth marked; the body is bulky and symmetrical with a posture which holds a hint of challenge or confrontation. The outline was changed and, no doubt, many of the original features lost in 1874 when the Reverend W. de St Croix of the Sussex Archaeological Society persuaded the Duke of Devonshire to fund a project to clear the turf back to the chalk and fill the trench with yellow bricks. At the time, the Duke remonstrated with de St Croix that the bricks didn’t fit the original outline and very little had been achieved of the purpose of the project. The original yellow bricks have been replaced on a number of occasions, the last time in 1969, none of which have followed the previous outlines and each has altered the Long Man’s shape slightly.
Why did the ancients carve a giant man there? I believe, as with the White Horse, they were broadcasting pride of ownership of that particular hill settlement. One thing is certain, the lovely curvature of the Downs and the uniform, slightly convex slope between the two almost identical spurs on which the Long Man has been carved would pass completely unnoticed if he wasn’t there. All the hill carvings, the few ancient ones which have survived or been resurrected and the many that were created in the nineteenth century during the great era of naturalist landscape design, draw the eye to a pleasing feature of landscape.
EARLY ‘LANDSCAPING’
The exertion that went into digging out hill carvings pales into insignificance when compared with some of the other creations that display an extraordinary commitment of time and effort for no apparent purpose. Silbury Hill near Avesbury, in Wiltshire, is the tallest prehistoric, human-made mound in Europe and one of the largest in the world – similar in size to some of the smaller Egyptian pyramids of the Giza Necropolis. Composed mainly of chalk and clay excavated from the surrounding area, the mound stands 40 metres high and covers about two hectares. It is an exhibition of immense technical skill and prolonged control over labour and resources. Archaeologists calculate that Silbury Hill was built nearly 5,000 years ago and took 18 million man-hours, or 5,000 men working flat out for fifteen years to deposit and shape 250,000 cubic metres of material. This incredible structure contains absolutely nothing; no burial chamber of a great tribal chief and not one iota of treasure. It was a huge disappointment to the first Duke of Northumberland, who employed an army of Cornish miners to burrow their way through the hill in 1766, convinced they would find him some loot. There is no explanation why anyone should want to build Silbury Hill, apart from the indisputable fact that it looks jolly impressive in the middle of an otherwise flat piece of ground.
Equally peculiar are the inexplicable earthworks known variously as black-dykes, devil’s dykes or Grim’s dykes, found from the south of England right up into southern Scotland. These consist of a ditch and mound of varying dimensions which follow a winding course across country, often traceable for miles. The great trench and mound of the Devil’s Dyke in Cambridgeshire and the long line of Offa’s Dyke on the Welsh Marches are two of the most well known. The Devil’s Dyke runs for 12 kilometres from the flat farmland of Reach, past Newmarket to the wooded hills around Woodditton, periodically reaching a height of II metres. Offa’s Dyke is the massive 200-kilometre linear earthwork, 20 metres wide and about 3 high, which roughly follows part of the current border between England and Wales. There are several other remains of earth banking: Grim’s Ditch in Harrow; the Black Ditches at Cavenham in Suffolk; the Brent, Bran and Fleam Ditches in Cambridge; and Woden’s Dyke in Wiltshire. In southern Scotland we have the Catrail, which meanders 22 kilometres from Roberts Linn, just up from the farm, to Hoscote Burn in south-western Roxburghshire. The 8-kilometre Picts Work Ditch, from Linglie Hill to Mossilee, near Galashiels and the Celtic Dyke in Nithsdale, Dumfriesshire, runs for about 27 kilometres parallel with the River Nith between New Cumnock and Enterkinfoot.
Scottish ‘black dykes’ are small compared to the others, being about two and a half metres at the base. Most of these earthworks appear to have been constructed in the early Anglo-Saxon period and all, even Offa’s Dyke, share one thing in common: for all the labour and energy that must have gone into building them, they serve no recognisable function. They are demonstrably not defensive; in most cases they are so short that an enemy would simply nip round the sides or, in the case of Offa’s Dyke, it would be impossible to man the entire length effectively. They are obviously not boundaries, and a theory popular among nineteenth-century Scottish historians, that they were built to hinder neighbouring tribes escaping with stolen livestock, was quickly discredited. The sort of semi-wild farm animals that were around in those days would easily have been driven through the wide ditch and up the slope of the earthwork.
I find it absolutely delightful that these ancient earthworks have completely stumped the theorists and not even the silliest neo-pagan can claim them as some sort of fertility symbol. So why were they built? In the absence of any other explanation, I presume the motive was similar to that which gave us Silbury Hill; someone must simply have woken up one morning and thought a big earth dyke in this or that location would improve the look of the landscape.
THE