The Wee Free Men

16

Chalk figures like the Rude Man of Cerne or the horses (such as the Uffington White Horse) that you find all over the chalk areas of Britain.

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.