Folk Rite & Fertility · Wilmington, East Sussex
The Long Man of Wilmington
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.
The story
He is the tallest human figure in Europe — 235 feet, some 72 metres — cut into the steep chalk of Windover Hill and holding a long staff in each hand. For centuries everyone assumed the Long Man of Wilmington was prehistoric. He isn't. The earliest picture of him is a drawing by the surveyor John Rowley in 1710 (not rediscovered until 1993), and it shows a vague, helmet-headed shadow in the grass rather than the sharp figure of today. In 2003 Professor Martin Bell of the University of Reading excavated the slope and found the hillside stayed stable until a sudden slippage in the sixteenth or seventeenth century — the mark of a figure freshly cut. A land snail in the soil hadn't reached England before the 1500s. The Long Man is early modern, not ancient; Ronald Hutton called him our first "unequivocally Early Modern hill figure".
What you see is younger still. Visible for most of his life only in slanting light or snow, he was marked out in yellow brick in 1874 and rebuilt in white-painted breeze blocks in 1969. And that beloved rumour — that prudish Victorians hacked off his manhood? No evidence for it at all. The Sussex Archaeological Society, which has looked after him since 1925, says plainly there is no historical or archaeological basis for the story. The 1710 drawing shows nothing of the kind. He probably never had one.
His pagan life is genuinely charming and genuinely recent. The Long Man Morris Men dance at dawn at his feet every May morning — but the side was only formed, in Eastbourne, in 1978. The "ancient rite" is younger than colour television. That is no reflection on the dancers, who keep something lovely alive; it is only that the antiquity is imaginary and the custom is new. He stands within sight of the Downs above Charleston, the same chalk country that drew the Bloomsbury painters — a landscape of both pagan revival and modern bohemia, each inventing its traditions as it went. Admire him from the road below, or walk up via the South Downs Way.
More stories at this spot
Sources
- Wikipedia
- Sussex Archaeological Society
- Sussex Past (Sussex Archaeological Society)
- The Past / Current Archaeology (Rodney Castleden feature)
- English Heritage (Uffington)
- Oxford Archaeology
- Long Man Morris (official)
- Project Gutenberg (Thomas Hughes, 1859)
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Documented historySpotted an error, or hold a better source? Write to marquis@marquisdemayfair.com — corrections are made, never defended. Our methodology.