This Side of the Pond

It’s not every day that a snail solves a centuries-old mystery. Thanks to a long-dead group of gastropods, we’ve now discovered that one of my county’s most famous landmarks both is and isn’t as old as we thought it was.

I’m referring in this somewhat confusing statement to a visual delight that I’ve introduced you to in this column before: the Cerne Abbas Giant. Carved into the hillside in Dorset, towering 180 feet over the nearby village, is what I’ve long believed to be an early example of what would happen if you left the kids alone for half an hour with an open box of chalk.

The giant is a stick drawing of a man, bright white against the grass. But if you ever go to visit, I think it’s safe to say that the amateur artistic skills of whoever put him there are not what will catch your eye.

No, the giant is not famous for having a bobble head, googly eyes and surprised eyebrows, nor for the fact he’s carrying a wiggly club. You probably won’t even pay much attention to the fact he has spaghetti arms, circles for nipples and flat feet.

What draws the eye to the Cerne Abbas Giant is that the only part of him drawn with any particular attention to detail is the area we can’t show you a photo of in the newspaper, for fear you’ll spit out your coffee. To give you some insight as to why, Historic England describes this part of him as “anatomically impressive.”

The giant is the Dorset version of the Nazca lines, only he’s not quite big enough to only be visible from a plane. He is, however, equally inexplicable.

We have no idea why he was put there in the first place, nor why generations of locals have made regular pilgrimages up the hillside to keep this fragile masterpiece in tip top condition. Even now, the chalk is replaced every 25 years and the grass around him is mown all year round.

He probably wasn’t supposed to look the way he does today. Ground surveys suggest he was meant to have a cloak and be standing over a disembodied head.

The Victorians meanwhile seem to be responsible for his most famous feature. It seems they made a mistake and merged two body parts together, although I can’t find details on which body parts could possibly have caused the confusion.

Theories as to his origins have been posited for years, and each of them would date him to vastly different time periods. Some say he was drawn as a parody of Oliver Cromwell, leader of the Puritans during the Civil War, while others think he depicts Hercules and still others suggest he’s meant to be Helis, the Anglo Saxon god of fertility.

This latter suggestion is why legend holds that anyone having trouble conceiving should make another attempt upon the giant himself. In the 1980s, Henry Frederick Thynne, Marquess of Bath, was reported to have done exactly that; his daughter was born ten months later and “G. Cerne” was listed as her godfather.

The Helis theory being the reason for his status among potential parents, the most popular theories would make the Cerne Giant very old indeed, because that particular group of inhabitants come from a period that began in 410 A.D. This would certainly explain the drawing skills, because art class had yet to be invented.

The first known record of repairing him comes from an account written in 1694 by the warden of the nearby abbey. The abbey itself is equally steeped in history because it’s associated with the nearby spring-fed well that was named for St. Augustine, who was sent by Rome to convert the country to Christianity and ultimately became the first Archbishop of Canterbury.

So when did the giant arrive on the hillside? Those snails seem to have given us the answer, and it wasn’t the one any of us expected.

Soil samples were taken from the giant and analyzed over the course of a year using technology that shows when individual grains of sand were last exposed to sunlight. Early on in the study, scientists found traces of microscopic snails that were only introduced to the area during medieval times, which means the theorists who believe he’s prehistoric must be wrong.

Once analysis was complete, material from the deepest layer revealed a date range for the giant’s creation between 700 and 1100 A.D., which suggests he was drawn by the Anglo Saxons after all. Does that mean the snails were lying?

Probably not, because other samples from the site suggested the giant was made much later, perhaps even as late as 1560 A.D. This posed a problem. After all, he can’t have been created twice.

The answer seems to lie in documents from Cerne Abbey, which don’t mention the giant until 1694. The abbey has stood since 987 A.D., so why would that have been the first time he got a dust and polish from the locals?

The new theory of the giant’s origins is therefore that he was created in the first place by the Saxons, but then neglected for hundreds of years. Maybe they didn’t have a lawnmower.

Centuries later, he was somehow rediscovered, and he’s been properly pruned ever since. It’s satisfying to have an answer to such an old and lingering mystery, but I’m not sure it’ll make much difference to the tourist trade – after all, that’s not what draws any of them to visit our well-endowed giant.