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The Discworld’s Long Man is a set of three burial mounds. In Britain there is a famous monument called the Long Man of Wilmington, in East Sussex. It’s not a mound, but a chalk-cut figure on a hillside; the turf was scraped away to expose the chalk underneath, outlining a standing giant 70 meters tall. There are several such figures in England, but only two human figures, this and the Cerne Abbas Giant.

Chalk-cut figures have to be recut periodically, which provides opportunities to bowdlerize them. This is probably why the Long Man of Wilmington is sexless; it was recut in the 1870s, when, presumably, public displays of great big tonkers were rather frowned upon. However, the other chalk-cut giant in Britain, the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset, is a nude, 55-meter-tall giant wielding a club, who has a tonker about 12 meters long, and proudly upraised. Nearby is a small earth enclosure where maypole dancing, etc. was once held.

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