Paul Newman
Megalithomania has dominated people’s minds for centuries - people tramp miles to stare at or touch an isolated rock or standing stone. Considering the dramatic, legendary nature of their settings, Britain’s hill-figures have never been accorded the attention claimed by Stonehenge and Avebury. Is this because there is something elusive about gigantic graffiti? From the right vantage point, they look incredible, immense animal and human semblances overpowering the hillsides, yet up close their magic vanishes into so many inscrutable loops and lines.
In ancient times, one assumes hill-figures had a religious or totemistic significance. They related to a cultural ethos that we can only deduce by following scattered clues and making cautious deductions. But why did the craze for cutting hill-figures continue deep into this century? Why did it become the pastime of parish clerks, stewards and business men?
The obvious answer is: because they could think of no better way to spend their time. Ultimately speaking, our communal pleasures have a kind of exuberant senselessness. Gala days, sports days, carnivals, theatrical shows - all are grand explosions of energy creating a feeling of intense satisfaction at the time.
Similarly the cutting of a hill-figure demands a lively coordinated effort. Periods of intense digging and dumping chalk waste are followed by intervals where beer, sandwiches and laughter are passed around. In creating such an artefact, a community is engraving its signature on the land. Folk in Wiltshire and Dorset can look upon a white horse above their village or farm knowing that an ancestor helped carve it in the time of stagecoaches and blunderbusses. And folk in the Vale of the White Horse can gaze up at that stark white stallion looming above their farms and cottages and think of their ancestors toiling for months with antler picks and flints? For what? A shared memory, a legacy that will gallop down the centuries and still invoke the capacity to wonder?
Privileging
People who write books are guilty of a type of ‘privileging’ or putting a special emphasis on their subject, placing it firmly in the middle of debate rather than at the periphery. This is natural enough and hill-figures, because of their rarity and largeness, are often invested with pregnant mystery, as if they contain some vital prehistoric clue or cryptogram, but there is nothing innately mysterious about a representation on the ground. We are aware of the work of pavement artists, designers of floral clocks and ornamental hedges. Crafting and beautifying the landscape is a time-honoured pastime. But the problem with hill figures is that many believe they stand for far more than that: the Uffington Horse is not merely a tribal emblem but a religious symbol that might have attracted elaborate ceremonies. And the same occurs with the Cerne Giant who Rodney Castleden identifies as the focal point of a ritual complex involving a sanctuary bathhouse, temple enclosure and sacred well.
But although Castleden's evidence is shadowy, his argument is plausible. He shows a knowledge of the period and an ability to imaginatively intertwine the threads of his argument. This makes a change, for since their earliest notices, the Cerne Giant, the Uffington Horse and the Long Man of Wilmington, have attracted interpretations that might strike one as faintly outrageous. One of the most charmingly surreal of recent theories is that of Christine Whipp (1996) who dates all three carvings from the time of the Plantaganets. Initially she starts by relating the Cerne Giant to Dick Whittington marching off to London to make his fortune. Where is his companion cat, she asks? Study the ribs, nipples and belly button - see how the face of a cat assembles itself. Next, picking up a reference to the Giant’s missing lionskin cloak, she transforms the pussy into a bigger, fiercer cat. The Giant is none other than a portrait of Richard the Lionheart. His challenging stance celebrates his courage and skill as a fighter; the mighty penis stands as a satiric allusion to his inverted sexuality. As for the Long Man of Wilmington, he is none other than Richard’s chancellor, William Longchamps, the son of a Norman serf, who raised the ransom for Richard’s release and also shared his homosexual inclinations. To complete the trilogy, the Uffington Horse portrays an Arab mare brought back from the Crusades.
Integral Features of Landscape
How has the attitude of archaeologists towards hill figures developed in this century? The most notable tendency is that they are no longer seen as isolated gestures but as integral to the landscape. In any article on the Cerne Giant, the small Iron Age enclosure above his head called ‘The Trendle’ is invoked as though it bears a direct relationship to the figure. St Augustine’s Well, at the foot of Giant Hill, is also cited as a supportive feature. Similarly the Uffington Horse is coupled with the flat-topped spur of Dragon Hill and the chambered mound of Wayland’s Smithy - a time-honoured if not proven association. The Long Man, too, has been related to Windhover burial mound and other features in the Neolithic landscape.
This method is both productive and fallible. In any town centre, a medieval church can be seen nudging up to a building society office or a public convenience. But they are unintentional juxtapositions whose sole relationship is that of proximity. Hence the closeness of prehistoric artefacts to each other may not indicate a overall scheme or consciously ordered landscape, although a persuasive argument has been set out by John North, invoking features around White Horse Hill and the Long Man as the viewing-points of a sophisticated Neolithic star cult. This could be the case or it could be the more familiar situation of different monuments springing up in changing contexts down the centuries. Among hill-figure investigators, there is presently an automatic response of beating around the figure, finding a stone, a barrow, a spring or an ancient tree and introducing a series of attractive but questionable connections: "The Celts carved the Giant in the vicinity of the sacred well, uniting the 'feminine' water principle with the more masculine energies of the Giant..." In other words, fish around for anything 'old' in the vicinity and then initiate a dynamic linkage. I must confess that, in the absence of anything more pertinent, I have done this sort of thing myself.
The White Horse
Undoubtedly hill figures involve a spectacular continuity. It is likely that the Uffington Horse was not only scoured by the Celts but by Saxon landowners and their swains. By far the most renowned prehistoric carving in the south of England, the Horse dominates the vale that bears its name and is, artistically speaking, a triumph of imaginative omission. The lines that define it are landscape lines; they curve and melt into the greens and browns of scarp, dip and glacial terrace.
White Horse Hill is crowned by Uffington Castle, lying some 500 feet above sea level, south of the Horse and dating from the seventh century BC. This double-walled hillfort began as a timber box-rampart and was later revetted by a sarsen wall or breastwork. Identified by an older generation of antiquaries as the Danish encampment routed by Alfred the Great, it seems to have been disturbed or besieged in the Roman period, when the sarsens ‘collapsed’ or were pushed into the ditch and coins and debris were scattered over the interior. Many think that the occupants of Uffington Castle carved the Horse as a tribal totem or ensign. They draw attention to its situation on the border where four Celtic tribes converge.
New Light on an Old Horse
Soil is an active agent, subject to erosion by worms, moles, human footprints, ice, snow and rain. If you dig an immense hill-figure like the Uffington Horse, surrounded by a three-foot ditch, the soil around the edges will crumble away and build up in the trenches. If the figure is not scoured with each passing decade, the trenches will ‘green’ over and only a blurred outline will remain. Inevitably the men and women who restore or scour the trenches will not cut in exactly the same places, for the exposed chalk will have crumbled and broke loose in parts, and it will not always be clear where the exact limit of the old trench was. This friability will encourage slightly offtrack or ‘variant’ cuts – not dramatically different, but offering possibilities for those who wish to use the technique of OSL (optically stimulated luminesence) to date when the soil was last exposed to sunlight. In theory, a cross-section of the soils at the bottom of a representative sample of old cuts should give a broad indication of the age of the figure – of the period in which those little crumbs of earth first started dripping down the sides of the trench and filling it up.
It was with such information in mind that archaeologists, David Miles and Simon Palmer, opened an old cutting in the Horses’s beak. They found ‘a trench a metre deep cut into the brownish-coloured hill wash’ that was backfilled with clean hard chalk. Successive layers of ‘beaks’ - some over a metre longer than the present projection - were traced. A trench through the body showed that it had once been a metre or so wider but never strikingly different from its present design. The angle of the body had changed, climbing the hill over the centuries, so it now occupied the flat upper slope and is less visible from a distance. Soil samples taken from two of the lower layers of the Horses body, and from another cut near the base, produced three dates of approximately 1400-600 BC, the earliest of the samples being 1240± 360 BC and the latest 900± 340BC, indicating an Early Iron Age or Late Bronze Age origin.
This information was both a breakthrough and deathblow. Gone was the myth of the horse being King Arthur's steed or Wotan’s six-legged mount or a memorial of King Alfred's victory over the Danes. With the narrowing of the time band, the Horse seemed to have been created before the wave of Celtic tribes annexed that part of the Downs. The next thesis may place the hill-figure firmly in the Late Bronze Age or suggest it was cut by the wet and hungry refugees following the nuclear winter after the eruption of Mount Thekla.
When published, the figures raised a few eyebrows. Like the Hercules theory of the Cerne Giant, the Iron Age origins of the Horse had become respectable on the basis of purely artistic evidence coupled with a resistance to the idea that the regular repair of the Horse could have been kept up from the Bronze Age. Besides, the Horse was so typical of La Téne art that an earlier dating de-stabilised some widely held cultural assumptions.
The Red Horse of Tysoe
The Uffington Horse was by no means an isolated phenomenon. Another famous creature, the Red Horse of Tysoe, presided over the Warwickshire hills near Banbury but was allowed to grass over in the eighteenth century. Cut into the clay around Edgehill and reddened over, it became one of the wonders of Elizabethan England. That most authoritative of early interpreters, the Reverend Francis Wise, thought it was made to commemorate a rather dastardly act in 1461 when Richard, Earl of Warwick, at Towton, Yorkshire, during the Wars of Roses, in a fit of reckless desperation, leapt off his horse and plunged his sword into its side, saying that he would henceforth fight shoulder to shoulder with his men - an incident that allegedly saved the day. But many prefer to see the Red Horse as having a Saxon provenance, relating to the fierce war-god Tiw, who had his hand bitten off by the Fenris Wolf and to whom Tuesday or Tiwaz-day is sacred.
The Westbury Horse
However, it is not the clay of Warwickshire but the chalk of Wiltshire that provided an ideal canvas for the turf-artist, and there are more chalk horses in that county than any other. The most famous – or should I say conspicuous - of these beasts is at Westbury. Lacking the impressionistic panache of its cousin at Uffington, it is slightly wooden and formal-looking, like a docile creature staring at you over a farmer’s fence. But its setting, on the slope of Bratton Camp, is impressive and tradition ascribes it to King Alfred’s victory over the Danes at Ethandune; the Horse is - if you like - a badge of victory. But the present creature is the result of drastic cosmetic surgery performed in 1778 by Mr Gee, a steward of Lord Abingdon, on an older, sag-bellied beast, of pathetic appearance, with a tail resembling a dolphin’s and a large ringed eye. So now the debate still rages: how old was the original beast? Was it a cousin of the weird white horse of Uffington?
None of the other Wiltshire horses present a historical enigma. The elegant horse at Alton Barnes was cut by a tenant of Manor Farm, Mr Robert Pile, in 1812. The apologetic-looking Marlborough Horse was cut by schoolboys in 1804, and the giraffe-necked, originally glass-eyed Cherhill charger by Dr Christopher Alsop in 1780. Standing about two hundreds yards from the top of Labour-in-Vain hill, he boomed instructions through a megaphone to his workforce, ordering them to move around until a credibly equine shape was achieved and then the turf was pared away.
The Jolly Green Giant
Even more than the horses, hill-figures celebrating the human outline capture the imagination. Of these the Cerne Giant of Dorset is the most famous, on account of his swaggering immodesty. Everyone, from childless couples to bicycle designers and Durex salesmen, have trumpeted his obvious attribute. Proportionally speaking, his penis is not above average for a man nearly two hundred feet tall. Originally it was probably six feet shorter, for an enlargement occurred when the navel became overgrown in Edwardian times and was, in the subsequent scouring, mistakenly identified as the tip of the penis.
About three years ago, I attended a conference at Cerne in which academics pored over the blatant chalk shaft, charting any enlargement or diminishment down the centuries. Poets attended the well-publicised event, exposing many a raunchy stanza to the naked ear. New Agers added their contribution, speaking of the sanctity of the landscape and the Giant's ability to liaise with the fairy folk and work green magic.
Although a consensus says the Giant’s a Romano-British portrait of Hercules, it’s only a tentative conclusion. Scholars like Ronald Hutton argue, if the Giant is prehistoric, why is there no mention of him in medieval documents relating to Cerne Abbey? The earliest reference occurs in the parish records of 1694 in which the sum of ‘3 shillings’ is put aside for ‘cutting’ or restoring the outline. Hutton goes on to suggest that the Giant may be a fake. The Restoration was renowned for filth and frolics - what better symbol of the age than a naked giant impudently disporting himself?
A variant of this identifies the Giant as Oliver Cromwell. The Dorset historian, the Reverend Hutchins, recorded that the Giant was said to have been cut by the servants of Denzil Holles, a former lord of Cerne manor. This suggested to Jo Bettey that the Giant was as a lampoon against Cromwell by Lord Holles (1599-1680) who was a firebrand in his day. A wily, high-principled Parliamentarian, Holles scorned the later policies of the Lord Protector who was also known as 'The English Hercules' - there is a statue from Highnam Court glorifying him as such (decorously robed around the waist rather than rudely erect). But here again, the argument Bettey used to undercut the antiquity of the Giant comes into force - namely, lack of documentation. If a prominent landowner created such a gigantic, comical obscenity in the seventeenth century, why do we find no mention of it in any of the thousands of diaries, letters and gossipy broadsheets of the period? Surely there were enough men who hated Cromwell for a memory of this bawdy satire to have been preserved?
Evidence from soil probes indicates what we see today is not the complete portrait. Various irregularities and anomalies in the earth around the knoll – a low uplift of ground beneath the left wrist – suggest the Giant might be holding something. This is the thesis of Rodney Castleden who, in the mid-nineties, conducted a resistivity test on the figure. The readings were fed into a computer and, eventually, a pattern swelled up on the monitor – namely, a severed head with dangling dreadlocks and death-set eyes. Among their more middle class customs, Celtic warriors kept heads of their enemies in special caskets, preserved in oil and carefully groomed, and showed them off to dinner guests. The Cerne Giant is a naked fighting-man brandishing the spoils of his ferocity and may date from as early as 500 BC.
Obviously further confirmation of this dramatic interpretation is required. Few, I feel, are totally convinced, mainly because of the straggly nature of the re-drawing; the addition of cloak and dangling head mars the emblematic boldness of the concept. Not that an aesthetic reservation has any bearing on the ultimate argument. It is just that it places a great deal of faith in an intensely boosted resistivity pattern. While the outline of the cloak seem fairly clear, the dots and patches around the knoll could be joined in alternative ways, equally meaningful or puzzling. There is also a slight anachronism in that one might expect a warrior who has just removed an enemy's head to be wielding a sword rather than a club.
The Long Man
Unlike the Cerne Giant, the Long Man of Wilmington, Sussex, offers no obvious clues in his stance or sexless attributes. Only his staves vaguely speak of something tangible: a traveller, a sage, a magus, the Hindu deity Varuna - all these suggestions have been advanced. For the Long Man epitomises the central problem of identifying hill-figures, being vaguely evocative of many things in general and specifically evocative of nothing in particular.
Facing slightly east of true north, the Long Man lies on the slope of Windover Hill (702 feet) behind the village of Wilmington, Sussex. He is fenced-in for protection against archaeological zealots and vandals and marked out with 770 white concrete blocks, replacing the earlier bricks removed in 1969. His staves are 231 and 235 feet high, and it has been claimed than he is the Europe’s largest representation of the human form. There is evidence that the designer of the figure made allowance for the foreshortening effect of the slope. Just as the Cerne Giant can be fully appreciated from Weam Hill, the Long Man may be studied to best advantage from Wilmington churchyard although he only acquires human proportions proper when viewed from the air.
Until recently the earliest known sketch was the one made by Sir William Burrell in 1776, showing a clothed, shambling figure holding a rake in his right hand and a scythe in his left. However, in 1993, a new drawing was found on a map at Chatsworth House dating from 1710 when surveyor, John Rowley, was hired to map his client’s estate. This sketch showed a slightly flabby figure with a conical head and bulges where his ears should be. Eyes, nose and mouth are marked; kneecaps and pectorals are even hinted at faintly. The stance is symmetrical, feet facing outwards, and the posture holds a hint of challenge or confrontation. There is more of the warrior about him than the farmer or haymaker and the staves are significantly longer.
Naturally a new likeness invites new theorising, and the Long Man has endured plenty of that. For instance Mr Heron Allen (1939) forged a powerful case for the Long Man’s Roman origin, comparing the staves to the labarum (Banner of Christ) appearing on coins of Constantine the Great. Other details, such as the discovery of grog in 1969 and the allusion to ‘Roman bricks’ found beneath the carving, seem to support this date. Comparing the cluttered appearance of the image on the coin with the present-day Long Man, one must accept the figure has been drastically denuded.
Christopher Hawkes (1967) spotted a likeness between the Long Man and an outline on a bronze belt-buckle found at Finglesham, Kent, showing a naked Norse warrior in ceremonial attire. The Long Man had a similar stance and the poles were his twin spears, used on ritual occasions and for inciting pre-battle frenzy. When Sussex was converted to Christianity in the seventh century, the tops of the spears were changed into crosses in much the same way that Celtic saints made their marks on the standing stones of prehistory. But the crosses in turn became overgrown and were later misinterpreted as the rake and scythe of the Burrell sketch.
Of contemporary interpretations the most persuasive is that of Rodney Castleden (1983) who, in an exciting, closely argued study, restored the Neolithic case, translating the Long Man as the sun-god opening the dawn portals and letting the ripening light flood through. This poetic concept credits early man with a grasp of metaphoric and artistic skills. The staves have also been translated as the vestiges of a symbolic doorway: hence the Long Man become an initiate of the mystic arts about to enter or emerge from the otherworld.
At this point, someone is bound to say that this is rather like the Rorschach inkblot test. Each person projects onto these shapes what is presently going through their mind. Thus hill figures have come to possess inexhaustible symbolic significance. They refuse to be fixed to a century or epoch or specific intention. They trigger the romantic dreamer in us all. Some scholars glory in this confusion but many think it no bad thing that the technology is now available to narrow the time band a little. I have no doubt that OSL will probe the anatomies of the remaining figures, and I for one will enjoy having the clay washed from my eyes as the long-concealed silts yield their secrets.
Paul Newman’s book on hill-figures LOST GODS OF ALBION (Sutton Publishing, original price £19.99) is currently available at only £10.