Folk Rite & Fertility

Britain's largest chalk hill-figure, a 180ft naked club-wielder whose 35ft phallus made him a fertility icon; folklore holds that a couple who conceive on the figure will be blessed with children. Optically Stimulated Luminescence testing dated him to AD 700–1100; per NT senior archaeologist Martin Papworth, 'he was created very early on, perhaps in the late Saxon period, but then became grassed over and was forgotten.'

A 235ft chalk giant clasping two staves, a focus for neo-pagan and May-Day fertility ritual where the Long Man Morris Men dance at dawn. A 2003 excavation led by Professor Martin Bell of the University of Reading (with the Open University's Landscape Mysteries) strongly suggested the figure dates from the Early Modern period — the 16th or 17th century AD.

A vast 5,000-year-old henge long linked in antiquarian lore to pagan sun-worship and fertility rite — a strong prehistoric ritual anchor near Belfast. (Frame on pagan/fertility folklore; the central dolmen has a burial dimension so keep the emphasis celebratory.)

England's most famous sheela-na-gig — a grinning female figure frankly displaying her vulva — carved on the corbel of a perfect Norman church. Warning against lust, fertility charm, or apotropaic guardian? Scholars still argue; the carving outlasts every theory.

Britain's tallest megalith — over 25 feet of gritstone hauled ten miles and raised, most likely, as a late-Neolithic cult focus; the church was later planted beside it, folding the old fertility landscape into the new faith. Phallic readings are antiquarian tradition, flagged as such.

The oldest chalk figure in Britain, a 360ft Bronze Age horse leaping across the scarp above the dry valley called the Manger. Local folklore made the hill a fertility landscape — couples still climb it on midsummer nights — though the documented rite is the seven-yearly 'scouring' festival of the 1700s.

Six men carrying thousand-year-old reindeer antlers dance a full day around the parish each September — England's most venerable surviving folk rite, trailed for centuries by fertility folklore, with a man in a frock and a boy with a bow and arrow among the characters. The antlers are older than the Norman Conquest.

Each 30 April, thousands climb Calton Hill for the modern revival of Beltane — bonfires, body-painted performers, and the May Queen waking the Green Man in a frank celebration of the year's fertility. A living rite, honestly labelled: the revival is 1988, the festival it revives is genuinely ancient.

A late-medieval chapel carved with more than a hundred Green Men — pagan faces sprouting vines inside a Christian church, the old fertility spirit grinning from every corner of the stonework. The greatest concentration of the motif anywhere in Britain.

A jilted 5th-century princess, a suitor turned to ice, and a holy well whose sacred eels told women whether their lovers were faithful.

For a shilling you could write an enemy's name on slate, drop it in the water, and call down the wrath of St Elian — Wales's most feared well.

A star-shaped holy well beside the Elwy where a recusant Catholic family married off four daughters — one of them, in 1626, 'clandestinely'.

Courting couples were sent to bed together — clothed, a bolster between them — while the suitor whittled a spoon to prove he was husband material.

The 'Druid fertility temple' that isn't: Georgian and Victorian romantics literally rearranged the stones to make the legend fit.