DATING A DORSET GIANT
New studies reveal the age of Britain’s naughtiest hill figure
The giant figure of a naked man on the hillside at Cerne Abbas in Dorset has puzzled and amused people for centuries – but no one has ever been sure exactly how many centuries. There has been no shortage of theories: is he an Iron Age fertility symbol? A Roman figure of Hercules? A Saxon god? Or even a satirical cartoon of Oliver Cromwell? In early 2020 archæologists from the National Trust decided to settle the question, to mark 100 years of the Trust owning the site. At least that was the plan.
“The results of the research have been very surprising,” says senior archæologist Martin Papworth. “What we imagined and what we found were two different things.”
The giant was created by cutting an outline into the steeply-sloping hillside and ramming crushed chalk into the trench to make a smooth white surface. Every few years when the chalk becomes discoloured, eroded or overgrown, it has to be renewed (see FT385:4, 6-7). The archæologists planned to dig into the deepest parts of the figure and use optically stimulated luminescence dating to discover when the ground had last been exposed to daylight.
“We dug these little narrow trenches in his elbows and in his feet, where we knew the silts had washed down the hill and built up on the horizontal parts of the chalk,” Martin explains. “We found surprisingly deep archæology which showed people have been re-chalking him over and over again over a long, long period of time. We imagined that on such a steep hillside it couldn’t have been very deep but it was almost a metre of all these different chalks on top of chalk, and it was at the very base of these that we took our samples.”
The dig took place in March 2020, and as the coronavirus pandemic took hold in Britain, it became increasingly clear that the team were working against the clock.“If we’d gone a week later it wouldn’t have happened – we’d have been in lockdown. We grabbed a moment in time,” says Martin. The dig ended at twilight on the Friday before the first lockdown, but enough samples had been gathered for the lab work to go ahead. Now the results are in.
“The Cerne Abbas giant isn’t prehistoric and he’s not Roman either. In fact, he can’t be earlier than AD 700, so he’s Saxon or later,” reveals Martin.
The dates found in the samples range between the early 8th to the 15th century, with samples from the lowest layers giving a date range of 700 to 1100. This might give support to the theory that the giant represents a Saxon god named Helith or Helis. By 700 Dorset was officially Christian, but Wessex King Ine’s law code of 694 includes penalties for failing to baptise children or tithe income to the Church, which could suggest wholehearted uptake of the new ways might have been slower in some places. In the 11th century, the Benedictine writer Goscelin records a tale of St Augustine trying to convert the heathens of Cerne and being assaulted with fish tails for his trouble (although they later repented and were baptised). The story is wholly unhistoric, but might it contain a grain of folk memory that this area took longer to adopt the new religion than others?
The new dates certainly present historians with a conundrum. Why is there no mention of the giant in early records or surveys describing the village and the hill? And why would the monks of Cerne Abbey tolerate the scandalous figure of a naked man on their doorstep?
“That’s the trouble with archæology,” admits Martin. “It doesn’t always do the thing you expect it to do. It seems that though we can give an earliest date, we can’t be sure about a latest date. It’s definitely earlier than 1694 and our date range does seem to indicate that he’s mediæval. The science tells you something; I suppose we take that away and think a bit more.”
The survey team also collected samples of snail shells trapped in the silt layers and recorded carefully measured sectionplans of the different layers of chalk and silt. By examining the different snail species, they can tell whether the surrounding land was mostly covered with grass or scrub. The thickness of the different layers also gives some idea of how much time passed between each re-chalking of the giant. Based on these results, Martin has tentatively come up with a new theory.
“I wonder whether he was created very early on, perhaps in the late Saxon period, and that he became grassed over and was forgotten. Then at some stage, in low sunlight, people saw that figure on the hill and they decided to recut him. It’s another theory to put in the pot, but it works with my archæological section drawings and it reassures me about the Abbey being there and not mentioning it in any of its records. I guess someone like me always wants to know the answers and I think a lot of other people do too; but the good thing is, I think he still does have an air of mystery. We haven’t sorted it out completely, so I think everyone’s happy.”
Lisa Gledhill
1 The first written reference to the giant occurs in the accounts of the churchwarden of St Mary’s, Cerne Abbas, for 1694. He records spending three shillings for repairs to the giant.
Why would the monks tolerate a naked man on their doorstep?