Folk Rite & Fertility · Cerne Abbas, Dorset
Cerne Abbas Giant
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.'
Sources
Nearby on the map
One stone pier, two of literature's charged moments: Louisa Musgrove's reckless leap into Captain Wentworth's arms in 'Persuasion', and Fowles's hooded Sarah Woodruff staring out to sea — the most smouldering opening image in post-war English fiction.
FictionHot spotTragic RomanceStonehenge (Tess of the d'Urbervilles finale)Amesbury, Wiltshire · EnglandWhere Hardy's fugitive lovers Tess and Angel spend their last night together, Tess asleep on an ancient stone, before her capture — one of literature's most haunting doomed romances. (Note: Hardy's plot involves violence; on this map we feature only the Stonehenge love-and-loss scene, not the crimes.)
Fact & fictionScandal & SocietyTiger Bay (Cardiff's dockland demi-monde)Cardiff, Cardiff · WalesCardiff's legendary dockland — one of Britain's first truly multicultural quarters, notorious in its coal-boom heyday for sailors' taverns, dance halls and commercial affection, and beloved by those who lived there as a warm, tight community the papers never bothered to understand. Shirley Bassey is its most famous daughter.
Documented historyHot spotSpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.