# Long Man of Wilmington

hill figure on Windover Hill near Wilmington, Sussex, England, UK

Long Man, United Kingdom

Monument

## Story

• The Long Man of Wilmington is a staff-bearing hill figure on the steep north face of Windover Hill, and published lengths range from about 62 metres to 72 metres, with 75.5 metres suggested for the outline before 1873.
• He was long visible only as a shadow or a change of colour in the grass, first drawn by John Rowley in 1710, and once known locally as the Green Man.
• Brick dated to about 1545, and trenches in 2002 and 2004, point to a sixteenth-century outline, while older accounts place him in the Neolithic, the Iron Age, Roman Britain, or the Anglo-Saxon period.
• Yellow bricks set in 1873–74, and concrete blocks that are also called breeze blocks, replaced in 1969, form the line that is painted today.
• The Duke of Devonshire gave the figure to the Sussex Archaeological Society in 1925, a gift also dated 1923, and volunteers repainted its 770 blocks in autumn 2023 and on 23 May 2024.

## Visiting

Entry is free, and the figure is free for the public to access, though the rights of way to the base are probably not suitable for wheelchairs. Opening hours are 00:01 to 23:59 from Monday to Sunday between 1 January 2026 and 31 December 2026, and those times are provisional.

## History

The Long Man of Wilmington, also called the Wilmington Giant, stands on the steep north-facing slope of Windover Hill near Wilmington in East Sussex, and he holds a staff in each hand. Published heights do not agree: 72 metres, given as 235 feet and as 236 feet, an approximate length of 62 metres, a parish measurement of 69.2 metres or 227 feet, and a possible 75.5 metres, or 248 feet, before the bricks of 1873. For much of his recorded life he was only a shadow or a different green in the grass, noted in 1710, 1781, 1800, 1835, and 1851, and he was known locally as the Green Man.

John Rowley’s drawing of 1710, found in 1993 at Chatsworth House, is the earliest picture, and it shows a helmet-like face and a mark in the turf rather than a solid line. Sir William Burrell drew a rake and a scythe, shorter than the present staves, on a visit to Wilmington Priory in 1766, while another account dates a rake-and-scythe drawing to 1779. Ann Downs, who grew up at the priory in the 1840s, remembered feet pointing outwards and downwards, and later resistivity survey placed those feet slightly lower than the modern outline, with a possible scythe, flail, or crook on one staff.

In 1873 and 1874 William de St Croix led a group that set the outline in yellow bricks after trials showed the soil was too deep to reach chalk. Another account gives the restoration of about 1873 to the Duke of Devonshire and several thousand bricks, with an allegation that Roman bricks were found. In 1969 the bricks were replaced by breeze blocks, also described as concrete blocks. A shallow cut on the head, with one yellow brick of that relining, may be the Reverend Dearsley’s failed experiment of 1890.

The Duke of Devonshire gave the figure to the Sussex Archaeological Society in 1925, and a society timeline also places the gift in 1923. During the Second World War the figure was painted green so aircraft would not use it as a landmark, and it was scheduled on 1 May 1951. Wilmington Priory, founded by Herluin de Conteville in the mid-eleventh century and suppressed as an alien cell in 1414, stands under the hill, and the ninth duke conveyed it to the same trust in 1925. The story that monks cut the giant as a pilgrim is still repeated, though antiquaries doubted that monks would have made a naked figure.

Until the early twenty-first century the figure was usually called Neolithic, because a long barrow lies about 100 metres from its head, or Iron Age. John North argued that around 3480 BC it could have marked Orion. A buckle found in 1964 at Finglesham, in a cemetery later counted at 216 graves under Sonia Chadwick Hawkes, shows a figure possibly meant as Odin, holding two spears. Sheila Kaye-Smith, in 1953, read the staves as the god Baldur opening a gate of midsummer.

Martin Bell’s trench of 2002, presented with Aubrey Manning, dated early brick in a buried soil to a mean of 1545, plus or minus 30 years, after a long period of slope stability. That year falls in the reign of Henry VIII, given as 1509 to 1547, and in the Reformation century of the Tudor dynasty, which ran from 1485 to 1603. Ronald Hutton called the result an early modern hill figure. Six trenches in 2004, directed by Chris Butler with Bell, found no alternative feet cut into the chalk and nothing that contradicted a mid-sixteenth-century brick outline.

The blocks visitors see, 770 of them, were painted by about twenty volunteers in the autumn of 2023 and again on 23 May 2024, at the end of a campaign that raised £10,000, also described as more than £10,000. Eric Ravilious painted The Wilmington Giant in 1939, Benjamin Britten and Frank Bridge picnicked at the foot of the hill, and Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s Wyndore was written in Alfriston in 1936 under the figure’s influence. The maker and the reason were left unnamed.

## Photographs

- [The Long Man of Wilmington — Shiroi Hane](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/09/The_Long_Man_of_Wilmington_-_panoramio.jpg)
- [A turf-cut hill figure known as The Long Man of Wilmington, 914m south-east of Acorn Barn — Andrew Huggett](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Wilmington_Giant.jpg)
- [Long Man of Wilmington — Eric Ravilious](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Ravilious1925.png)
- [A view of the Long Man of Wilmington from the car park — Cupcakekid](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Long_Man_of_Wilmington.jpg)
- [Graphic of the Long Man of Wilmington. — UKPhoenix79](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1a/Long_Man_of_Wilmington.png)
- [Long Man of Wilmington: East Sussex. The long man is just south of the A27, just off centre (to the west of centre of the square). — Pam Brophy](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/Long_Man_of_Wilmington%2C_East_Sussex_-_geograph.org.uk_-_771.jpg)
- [Long Man of Wilmington. Taken from the car park — bruce](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Long_Man_of_Wilmington_-_geograph.org.uk_-_21405.jpg)
- [Farmland near Arlington. Looking down the Weald Way footpath towards the Downs. The Long Man of Wilmington, a chalk figure etched into the side of Wilmington — Simon Carey](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Farmland_near_Arlington_-_geograph.org.uk_-_202997.jpg)
- [The vandalised Longman with his new giant phallus — Vanhammeruk](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c9/Longman.jpg)
- [Summary: Eastbourne Giants, Long Man of Wilmington, Sussex. The Eastbourne Giants at the Giant's Rest pub in Wilmington, Sussex (near the Long man of — Sue Wallace](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Eastbourne_Giants.jpg)

## Sources

- [Long Man of Wilmington](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Man_of_Wilmington) — Wikipedia
- [The Long Man of Wilmington](https://sussexpast.co.uk/our-historic-sites/the-long-man-of-wilmington/) — Sussex Archaeological Society
- [A Short History of the Long Man of Wilmington](https://sussexpast.co.uk/short-history/long-man-of-wilmington/) — Sussex Archaeological Society
- [A turf-cut hill figure known as The Long Man of Wilmington, 914m south-east of Acorn Barn](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1002293) — Historic England
- [Long Barrow on Windover Hill, Long Man](https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1012797) — Historic England
- [New work overturns date for chalk Long Man of Wilmington](https://archive.reading.ac.uk/news-events/2003/October/pr438.html) — University of Reading
- [Further excavations at the Long Man, Wilmington](https://www.cbasltd.co.uk/_files/ugd/472ea5_2f9e36a7ecf048868d7bfa35389b5548.pdf) — Chris Butler
- [Long Man of Wilmington repainted by volunteers](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgeeggvnjw8o) — BBC News
- [Seeing Brilliant White From The Skies](https://www.brewers.co.uk/news/article/longman-paint-donation) — Brewers Decorator Centres
- [The Long Man of Wilmington](https://www.visitsoutheastengland.com/things-to-do/the-long-man-of-wilmington-p197081) — Visit South East England
- [The Long Man gets a re-paint as part of Sussex Past fundraising campaign](https://www.sussexexpress.co.uk/news/the-long-man-gets-a-re-paint-as-part-of-sussex-past-fundraising-campaign-4640902) — Sussex Express
- [The Long Man of Wilmington - panoramio.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Long_Man_of_Wilmington_-_panoramio.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Wilmington Giant.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wilmington_Giant.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Ravilious1925.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ravilious1925.png) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Long Man of Wilmington.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Long_Man_of_Wilmington.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Long Man of Wilmington.png](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Long_Man_of_Wilmington.png) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Long Man of Wilmington, East Sussex - geograph.org.uk - 771.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Long_Man_of_Wilmington,_East_Sussex_-_geograph.org.uk_-_771.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Long Man of Wilmington - geograph.org.uk - 21405.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Long_Man_of_Wilmington_-_geograph.org.uk_-_21405.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Farmland near Arlington - geograph.org.uk - 202997.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Farmland_near_Arlington_-_geograph.org.uk_-_202997.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Longman.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Longman.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Eastbourne Giants.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastbourne_Giants.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

The Long Man of Wilmington, also called the Wilmington Giant, is a hill figure on the steep north-facing slope of Windover Hill, near the village of Wilmington in East Sussex. The hill is part of the north-eastern escarpment of the South Downs. The figure stands about six miles, or 9.7 kilometres, north-west of Eastbourne, and about a third of a mile, or 540 metres, south of Wilmington. A scheduling description places the same figure 914 metres south-east of Acorn Barn. It is drawn to look in proportion when seen from below, and it holds a staff in each hand. From a distance it can seem to have been cut through turf to the chalk, but the line people see today is a modern repair.

Published lengths do not agree. One account gives 235 feet, which is 72 metres, and an accompanying measurement gives the length as 72 metres or 236 feet. The society that cares for the figure calls it 72 metres tall and Europe’s largest portrayal of the human form, and also Europe’s largest depiction of a human figure. A scheduling description calls the human figure approximately 62 metres long. The civil parish that took the figure’s name gives a further measurement, 69.2 metres or 227 feet. Survey work on the older outline has also suggested that before the bricks of 1873 the figure may have stood as much as 75.5 metres, or 248 feet, tall. These figures are left side by side because the accounts do not settle on one of them. The body is a simple standing man. Early drawings give him objects other than plain staves, and they do not all put the feet in the place where the modern blocks stand.

The land around the figure became the civil parish of Long Man on 1 April 1999, formed from the older parishes of Folkington and Wilmington. The parish includes Wilmington, Milton Street, and Folkington, and it is named after the hill figure. It reaches the left bank of the River Cuckmere where that river begins to cut through the South Downs, with the Cuckmere Valley immediately south. The figure itself occupies the steep grass of Windover Hill above the village.

For much of its recorded life the Long Man was not a hard white line. It was a shadow or an indentation in the grass, visible after a light fall of snow, or as a different shade of green in summer. It is described or drawn in that condition in 1710, 1781, 1800, 1835, and 1851. Locally it was once often called the Green Man. The earliest known picture is a drawing made by the surveyor John Rowley in 1710, found in 1993 among the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth House. That drawing suggests a figure that was a mark in the grass rather than a solid outline, and a face with a distinctive helmet-like shape. Chatsworth has been the seat of the Duke of Devonshire, and it has belonged to the Cavendish family since 1549. Bess of Hardwick began the new house in 1553 and finished it in the 1560s. The drawing’s presence there fits the later ownership of Wilmington by the same family, but the sheet itself is the first date at which the figure is known to have existed.

For many years the earliest record was thought to be a drawing made by Sir William Burrell when he visited Wilmington Priory in 1766. Burrell was born on 10 October 1732 and died on 20 January 1796. He was an antiquary who set himself to the history of Sussex, visiting nearly every parish, copying records, and having drawings made of churches, houses, and monuments. He did not print the collection. He left it to the British Museum. His 1766 drawing shows a figure holding a rake and a scythe, both shorter than the present staves. A scheduling description instead dates a drawing of the rake and scythe to 1779. Both dates are kept, because one account says 1766 and another says 1779. Julian Cope, the musician and author born on 21 October 1957, recorded the Burrell drawing in The Modern Antiquarian in 1998, including the shorter rake and scythe. Earlier pictures also suggest a helmet or a hat, and a different, indistinct position for the feet.

People who knew the figure before it was bricked said that the feet had pointed outwards and downwards, so that the giant seemed to be coming down the hill. Ann Downs, who grew up at Wilmington Priory in the 1840s, used those words. Resistivity surveys in the 1990s by Rodney Castleden, read with shadow marks on early photographs, gave strong evidence that the feet had pointed outwards and had sat slightly lower than they do now. The same work suggested that the figure had first been made by trenching, in the manner of other chalk hill figures, and then abandoned after only a few scourings. There was also some evidence for a real feature on one staff, like a scythe blade, a flail, or a shepherd’s crook, and for a helmet or hat. The proportions seem to have been pulled slightly by the bricking of 1873 and by the replacement of those bricks in 1969.

In 1873 and 1874 a group led by William de St Croix, vicar of Glynde, marked the outline with yellow bricks, whitewashed and cemented together. De St Croix was born on 13 May 1819 at Windsor Castle and died on 18 March 1877 at Glynde. He was vicar there from 1844 until his death, wrote sermons and archaeological papers, and edited the county archaeological collections. The archaeologist John S. Phené was brought into the project. A talk he gave in 1873 to the Royal Institute of British Architects had inspired it, and he soon had reservations about both the bricks and the design that was used. The original hope had been to cut the figure down to the chalk bedrock. Trials showed that the soil was too deep, and that plan was dropped. Another account says that the Duke of Devonshire restored the figure in about 1873, using several thousand bricks, and that Roman bricks were alleged to have been found during that work. The two accounts, one of a vicar’s committee and one of a ducal restoration, are both on record. It has been claimed that the restoration put the feet in the wrong place. There is no archaeological or historical evidence that the Victorian repair removed genitals from the figure, despite a story that prudish restorers did so.

A later trench on the head of the figure found a shallow U-shaped cut under the modern blocks, only just into the chalk, filled with chalk rubble. In the top of the fill were two red bricks from an early twentieth-century repair, and under them one yellow brick from the relining of 1873–74. The first reading of that cut was that it was fairly recent, and that it may have been an experimental trench dug by the Reverend Dearsley in 1890. The records of that experiment, passed on by Rodney Castleden, say that it failed and that the bricks of the outline were put back.

In 1969 the bricks were taken out and replaced. One account says breeze blocks and lime mortar. Another says concrete blocks. The scheduling record says concrete blocks, and partial excavation at that time found fired clay, possibly fragments of Roman tile. Geophysical survey in 1969 and again in 1996 indicated that the concrete outline does not match the outline from before 1873. It suggested a taller figure and taller staves, and a left-hand staff shaped as a scythe. The blocks have been painted white so that the figure can be seen from far away. One gardener’s account says the 1969 change was made because the bricks were being taken as souvenirs or were eroding, and that the same account still calls the original figure chalk, set in yellow brick in Victorian times to save it from erosion. That claim of an original chalk-cut line sits against the later trenches, which found no evidence that the figure was ever cut down to solid chalk.

The Duke of Devonshire gave the figure, and a parcel of land around it, to the Sussex Archaeological Society. The gift is dated 1925. A timeline kept by the society also places the gift of the figure and the surrounding land in 1923. The society’s older name, the Sussex Archaeological Trust, is the body named in the 1925 transfer of the neighbouring priory. The title Duke of Devonshire was created in 1694 by William III for the 4th Earl of Devonshire, in recognition of support during the Glorious Revolution. The ninth Duke of Devonshire conveyed Wilmington Priory to the Sussex Archaeological Trust in 1925. The trust repaired the priory and set up a small museum of farm implements there. The priory later passed to the Landmark Trust and is let as holiday accommodation. The hill figure stayed with the archaeological society, which still cares for it and keeps it free to visit. Some later reports call the owner the Sussex Archaeology Society and note that it trades as Sussex Past.

During the Second World War the figure was painted green so that enemy aircraft would not use it as a landmark. The war ran from 1 September 1939 to 2 September 1945. It was a scheduled monument from 1 May 1951. The scheduled area includes the turf-cut figure and associated remains below ground, on that steep northern slope, and it excludes modern fences, fence posts, and information boards, while including the ground beneath them.

Wilmington Priory stands under the hill. It was a Benedictine priory in what is now the parish of Long Man. Herluin de Conteville founded it in the middle of the eleventh century as a small alien cell of St Mary. In 1243 it was enlarged into a priory, but it was run mainly as a grange for the lands held in the area by the Benedictine monks of Grestain Abbey in Normandy. In the fourteenth century the building was fortified with a portcullis and a three-storey drum tower, and the tower was demolished in the eighteenth century. The grange was suppressed with other alien cells in 1414 and given to the Dean and Chapter of Chichester Cathedral. In 1565 they granted it to Sir Richard Sackville. About 1700 the estate passed to the Compton family, later Earls of Wilmington, and by marriage from them to the Cavendish family. What stands today is a fourteenth-century two-storey L-shaped house incorporating part of a thirteenth-century building, altered in the eighteenth century. Ruins lie to the north and south, and under one of them is a fourteenth-century vaulted undercroft. The priory church is now the parish church of St Mary and St Peter. The priory was open daily in the 1960s.

An early suggestion, sometimes called a local tradition, was that monks from this priory cut the Long Man and that he represented a pilgrim. Antiquaries did not widely believe it. They thought monks were unlikely to have made an unclothed figure. The society that owns the hill still records the idea that an artistic monk of the priory made the figure at some time between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries. The priory’s own dates sit awkwardly against a sixteenth-century brick outline: the alien cell had been suppressed in 1414, and the site had been granted to Sir Richard Sackville in 1565. That does not by itself name another maker. It only shows that a community of Benedictine monks was not still in possession in the middle of the sixteenth century.

Until the first decade of the twenty-first century the figure was most often said to be Neolithic, largely because a long barrow stands nearby, or Iron Age, because it was thought to resemble other hill figures. The long barrow on Windover Hill lies on gently sloping ground near the crest, 100 metres from the head of the figure, and from a distance it sits on the skyline. It is oriented north-east to south-west, with neither end clearly higher or broader. The mound is about 68 metres long and 12 to 13 metres wide, and at its highest it survives to nearly 2 metres. A former trackway has split it into two uneven parts and can make the north-eastern end look like a separate knoll. Flanking ditches, from which chalk and earth were quarried, show as slight hollows with different vegetation. No record of an excavation there survives. A survey showed a type of monument characteristic of the Neolithic. A separate general account of prehistoric hill figures says that all examples are believed to have begun in the Iron Age, even where later periods changed their appearance, and that very few survive. The scheduling text for this figure itself says that the date is unknown, although a prehistoric or a Roman origin has been suggested. Those statements are not the same claim, and both remain in the record.

John North, the historian of science born on 19 May 1934 and dead on 31 October 2008, wrote that during the centuries around 3480 BC the figure would have been placed to mark the movement of the constellation Orion across the ridge above it, and that it might have been a manifestation of a Neolithic astral religion. Another suggestion gave the figure a Romano-British origin. Roman coins bearing a similar figure have been used to argue that he existed in the fourth century, and one account stretches that comparison to the fourth or fifth centuries. Roman bricks were alleged in the 1873 restoration, and fired clay that might be Roman tile was found in 1969. Fieldwalking of the two fields below the figure in 2004 found very little prehistoric material and no Roman artefacts. Most of those finds were later medieval and post-medieval.

An Anglo-Saxon origin gained support after 1964, when a buckle from Finglesham in Kent showed a figure, possibly Odin, holding two spears in a way that resembles the Long Man. Anglo-Saxon England runs from the end of Roman rule in the fifth century to the Norman Conquest in 1066. By the late sixth century the land was dominated by small pagan kingdoms, Sussex among the most powerful of them, and in the seventh century those kingdoms were converted to Christianity. Finglesham Anglo-Saxon cemetery, near Sandwich, was used from the sixth to the eighth centuries. It was an inhumation cemetery, with no evidence of cremation. Many of the dead were buried with ornaments, weapons, and domestic objects, and some graves had mounds. Quarrying threatened the site, and W. P. D. Stebbing and W. Whiting excavated in 1928 and 1929. Deep ploughing brought a further excavation, financed by the Ministry of Public Building and Works, from 1959 to 1967, directed by Sonia Chadwick Hawkes. What was thought to be the full cemetery was opened, 216 graves in all. Hawkes, born on 5 November 1933 and dead on 30 May 1999, specialised in early Anglo-Saxon archaeology and also led the excavation of the cemetery at Worthy Park in Hampshire. Odin, from Old Norse Óðinn, is a god of Norse mythology and of wider Germanic paganism. The name is traced to a Proto-Germanic form, Wōðanaz, glossed as lord of frenzy or leader of the possessed. In the stories gathered in the Prose Edda he is head of the Æsir, carries a spear and a ring, and is husband of Frigg and father of Baldr. The Finglesham comparison is a similarity of pose. It is not a statement that the Wilmington figure is a portrait of that god.

Sheila Kaye-Smith, the Sussex and Kent novelist born on 4 February 1887 and dead on 14 January 1956, offered another northern god. In Weald of Kent and Sussex, published in 1953, she wrote that the figure represents the god Baldur standing at the gate of Midsummer. On Midsummer Day, she argued, the rising sun would come over the eastern rim of the Andredsweald, cross the trees, and enter the hillside beyond them. In that hillside, she said, the ancients saw a gate of midsummer and morning, and a god opening it, a hand on each pillar. To modern eyes he seems instead to hold an upright pole in either hand. Baldur is the insular form of Baldr, a son of Odin and Frigg, whose death in the Old Norse poems is both a grief to the gods and a sign that Ragnarök is coming. His wife is Nanna, his son is Forseti, and his hall is Breidablik. Kaye-Smith’s reading is a theory of meaning. It is not an excavated date.

The early modern period is the frame now most often put around the brick evidence. That period is placed roughly from about 1500 to about 1800. There is no single opening year. It is often begun at the start of the sixteenth century or the seventeenth, and it is often ended in the eighteenth or the nineteenth. Among the events proposed as its start is the Reformation. The Reformation, a theological movement in sixteenth-century western Christianity, challenged the papacy and the authority of the Catholic hierarchy and is treated as one of the passages from the Middle Ages into the early modern period. It is usually dated from Martin Luther’s Ninety-five Theses in 1517. In England, Thomas Cranmer led the Reformation that produced Anglicanism. The House of Tudor held the English throne from 1485 to 1603, after Henry VII’s victory at Bosworth Field on 22 August 1485, and its five monarchs were Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, and Elizabeth I. Henry VIII’s reign is given as 1509 to 1547. A mean date of about 1545 for brick in the buried soil below the Long Man therefore falls inside that reign, and inside the Tudor dynasty, and inside the century of the Reformation.

Martin Bell of the University of Reading excavated a trench at the foot of the slope in 2002, with local archaeologists, as part of the television series Landscape Mysteries. A news account of 6 October 2003 describes a programme called Figures in the Chalk, broadcast at 7.30 on Thursday 2 October, presented by Aubrey Manning. The hill-figure page calls the same investigation a 2003 project associated with Manning’s Open University programme of that name. Aubrey Manning, born on 24 April 1930 and dead on 20 October 2018, was a zoologist and broadcaster. He was Professor of Natural History at the University of Edinburgh from 1973 to 1997, received an OBE in 1998, and presented Landscape Mysteries among other programmes. The aim of the trench was to see how the landscape around the figure had changed, because a chalk figure of this kind can only be cut and seen in short grassland.

The slope had been wooded in the early Holocene. Ancient tree holes showed dense woodland, then some clearance and activity in the Neolithic, put at about 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. Pottery and flint show people in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. Clearance, cultivation, and colluviation in the Bronze Age buried a soil dated by optically stimulated luminescence to 1650 plus or minus 940 BC. By the Bronze Age there was open downland, some soil erosion, and hints of settlement near the base of the slope, but not yet a sign of special activity on the great slope itself. After that colluviation came a long stability, read as running from the Iron Age to the early medieval period, or, in the 2003 account, from the Iron Age through Roman and medieval times. Few artefacts and little sediment were laid down. People were not, on this evidence, drawn to this particular spot. Land snails in the buried soil include species not found in the area before the medieval period, and the soil also held medieval pottery.

The same buried soil held pieces of early brick. The mean age of four samples was 1545 plus or minus 30 AD. Ed Rhodes, of the Research Laboratory for Archaeology at Oxford, dated the brick by optically stimulated luminescence, and a less precise date on the sediment of the buried soil agreed with it. Larger pieces of chalk then sealed that surface, and erosion of chalk and soil has continued to the present, carrying more brick of the same type. The marked change, from a long stable sheep-grazed slope to a slope that was still short grass but much less stable, was thought to relate to the making of the giant above. The provisional conclusion was that the hill figure may have been created in the late medieval or early post-medieval period, and that it might have been outlined in brick from the start. The 2003 account put the creation in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and suggested a context of religious and social conflict around the Reformation, the civil war, and the Restoration. Who made the figure, and why, was left a mystery. Ronald Hutton, the historian of early modern Britain born on 19 December 1953, wrote that there was at least cause to celebrate a first, apparently unequivocal, early modern hill figure, and that historians would have to reckon with it. The same work opened the possibility of a Tudor or Stuart political satire, of the kind then being suggested for the Cerne Abbas Giant, or of a religious image tied to the Reformation.

The 2003 study also compared other chalk figures. It noted that a date in the time of Cromwell had been suggested, on separate historical evidence, for the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset, and it placed both giants in the early post-medieval period. Most other hill figures, mostly horses, were already known to be of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Uffington horse was the exception: the same luminescence method had dated sediments in the cut of that outline to the later Bronze Age. Chalk figures had therefore existed in prehistoric landscapes, while the Wilmington giant was argued to be much later than the Neolithic or Iron Age dates commonly given to it. The Cerne Abbas Giant remains the other of the two major human hill figures still extant in England. It lies north of Dorchester, and it too is a scheduled monument. The Osmington White Horse is named with the Long Man as a hill figure that includes a human form. So are the Fovant Badges.

The Fovant Badges are a separate set of regimental badges cut into Fovant Down, near Fovant in south-west Wiltshire, between Salisbury and Shaftesbury. Soldiers garrisoned nearby, waiting to go to France in the First World War, cut them, the first in 1916. After the outlines were cut, they were refilled with chalk brought from a nearby slope, up to 50 tons for a badge, and a badge took an average of fifty men six months. Nine of an original twenty remain. They are scheduled monuments and are recognised as war memorials. They are not the Wilmington figure, and they are not evidence for its date. They are the other English hillside carvings, besides Osmington, that the Long Man’s own account groups with it because a human design appears in the turf. The only other hill figure in East Sussex is the Litlington White Horse, three miles south-west of the Long Man.

In 2004 members of the Sussex Archaeological Society, directed by Chris Butler, returned with Martin Bell and a team from Reading. The society needed a conservation plan. The concrete blocks were in disrepair. Castleden’s suggestion that the feet and the left leg had been substantially altered in the nineteenth-century restoration made it worth trying to find the older position before repairs. The open questions were the date, and whether the figure had ever been cut in chalk at all. Six trenches were dug on the outline. In trenches 1, 2, 5, and 6, on the lower part of the figure, natural chalk lay 300 millimetres below the ground. The trenches sat on the outline and were meant to test proposed alternative positions. No features were cut into the chalk or into the soil above it. The finds were almost entirely post-medieval, mostly brick fragments from the nineteenth-century outlines and from the suggested sixteenth-century brick outline. No bricks of any date were found in place in those four trenches.

Trench 3, on the head, found the U-shaped feature already described, with the early twentieth-century red bricks and the single yellow brick of 1873–74. Trench 4 was placed above the right-hand staff to test whether the staff had once run further up the slope and turned into a crook, as Castleden’s geophysics had suggested. A shallow feature lay where that extension would be, but beach pebbles and mortar in it were read, provisionally, as a nineteenth-century feature. The more striking find there, high on the slope, was half a metre of colluvium, with horizons taken provisionally as ancient land surfaces, numerous prehistoric worked flints, and a single sherd of prehistoric pottery. Geophysics on the prehistoric monuments along the top of Windover Hill told something about the monuments already known, and it did not show anything that was not already visible as an upstanding earthwork. The interim report, written while artefact and dating work was still going on, concluded that there was no evidence for an alternative position of the legs or feet, while noting that a figure marked only with bricks, and never deeply cut, might leave no such evidence for a trench to find. There was no evidence that the figure was ever cut down to solid chalk, and no clear chalk-filled trenches of the kind that mark the outlines at Uffington and at Cerne Abbas. Nothing contradicted a provisional date in the mid-sixteenth century for the first brick outline. The fieldwalking’s later medieval and post-medieval emphasis was read as fitting that date. Permission for the fieldwork came from the Sussex Archaeological Society, English Heritage, and English Nature, and the farmer Ray Ellis and the Folkington Estate allowed the fieldwalking and the geophysical survey.

The figure has been a subject for artists and musicians who lived with the Sussex hills, and for writers who used it as an image. Eric Ravilious, born on 22 July 1903 and killed on 2 September 1942, grew up in Eastbourne after his family moved from Acton, and he painted the South Downs throughout his career. In 1939 he painted a series of watercolours of chalk hill figures. The Wilmington Giant is one of them. He was the first British war artist to die on active service, lost in an aircraft off Iceland. Benjamin Britten and his teacher Frank Bridge used to picnic at the foot of the figure. Bridge, born in Brighton on 26 February 1879, died on 10 January 1941, and his grave is in the churchyard of St Mary the Virgin at Friston, East Sussex. He taught Britten privately, and Britten later wrote the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge in 1937. Britten was born in Lowestoft on 22 November 1913 and died on 4 December 1976. His best-known works include the opera Peter Grimes and The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, both of 1945, and the War Requiem of 1962. Avril Coleridge-Taylor, born on 8 March 1903 and dead on 21 December 1998, wrote Wyndore, a name for Windover, for chorus and orchestra. The hill figure is recorded as an influence on that work, which was written in Alfriston in 1936. She was the daughter of the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, made her formal debut as a conductor at the Royal Albert Hall in 1933, and in 1939 moved to Buxted in East Sussex, with views over the South Downs. She died in Seaford, on the Sussex coast. Her Sussex Landscape, Opus 27, is also dated 1936.

In 1989 Paul Geerts, the Flemish comics artist born on 16 May 1937, wrote a Spike and Suzy story, De krachtige krans, published in English as The Circle of Power, in which the Long Man is the protagonist’s helper. Geerts was the main artist of that series from 1971 until 2002, after succeeding Willy Vandersteen. In 2020 the figure inspired On Windover Hill by Nathan James, first performed at Boxgrove Priory, near Chichester, on 7 March 2020. Arthur Beckett’s The Spirit of the Downs, in 1909, gave a chapter called “The Hero on the Hill” to the Long Man and told a fictional story of Saxons drawing a giant after a victory over the Britons. That chapter is a fiction, not a dated origin. Philip Carr-Gomm’s The Druid Way, in 1993, drew attention to the figure as a sacred site for modern readers. A dramatisation of The Sandman later used the hill figure, under the name Wendel, as a gatekeeper. The comic that lies behind that scene was written by Neil Gaiman.

At dawn on May Day the Long Man Morris Men dance at the foot of the figure. The hill also draws neo-pagan ritual on the Sundays closest to the eight pagan festivals of the year. The Council of British Druid Orders has called the place an ancient pagan site of worship. In 2007 the figure was cleaned for May Day. In the same year a television fashion programme was allowed by the society to put a temporary female outline on the hill: Trinny Woodall, Susannah Constantine, and 100 women in white boiler suits lay down to suggest pigtails, breasts, and hips. The chalk line was not permanently changed. Twenty-two neo-pagans protested during the filming. The society later apologised for offence caused to any individuals or groups.

On the night of 17 to 18 June 2010 a large phallus was painted on the figure. It appeared to have been done with a football-pitch marker or something like it. On 16 October 2015, protesters against hydraulic fracturing placed the words “FRACK OFF!” above the figure, apparently in tarpaulin, and the words were soon removed. On 27 January 2021, during the coronavirus pandemic, a face mask was painted onto the figure.

The outline is repainted because the blocks dull. A society photograph is identified as a repaint in 2020. On 28 November 2023 a decorating firm recorded that, earlier that autumn, about twenty volunteers had painted the 770 concrete blocks after a gift of 70 litres of white masonry paint. The head gardener James Neal said the figure is normally painted every three to five years, that it is strimmed first and the encroaching growth is cut back a few weeks later, and that a painting day usually runs from about nine in the morning until about three in the afternoon. A fundraising campaign launched in December 2022, called Adopt a Piece of History, asked donors to pay £30 toward one of those 770 blocks. It raised £10,000, and one account says more than £10,000. Nearly 300 donors are reported in several accounts, while another account says almost 100. Volunteers repainted the figure on Thursday 23 May 2024, after an earlier attempt had been postponed for bad weather. A report dated 29 May 2024 placed that work in the previous week and called it the end of the campaign. The society’s own pictures include the painting of 23 May 2024.

What the place was for is still unanswered in the records that describe it. Fertility symbol, ancient warrior, war-god suggested by a helmet-like face, pilgrim, astronomical marker, Romano-British figure, spear-bearing god, Baldur at a midsummer gate, Tudor or Stuart satire, and Reformation image have all been proposed. The excavated sequence says something narrower. The hillside was used in the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, then seems to have been ordinary stable grassland from the Iron Age into the Middle Ages, and then, at a buried soil with medieval pottery and brick of about 1545, it became unstable in a way the excavators tied to the making of the figure. The 2004 trenches strengthened the idea of an early post-medieval brick outline and found nothing that required a deep chalk-cut giant of prehistoric date. They also failed to recover an older line of feet in the ground. The modern blocks, painted and replaced more than once, are the outline visitors see. The maker, and the reason, were left unnamed. A Sussex clergyman, A. A. Evans, also written Reverand A. A. Evans, put the same limit in a sentence the owners still quote: the giant keeps his secret and from his hillside flings out a perpetual challenge.

Canonical page: https://getsitesee.com/places/long-man-of-wilmington