Mysteries of Cerne Abbas Giant

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better. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval. I'm Dr Kat Jarman and today we're going to be hearing about a very new discovery that I'm really quite excited about. Now when new discoveries are reported in the media, the journalists usually describe archaeologists as either surprised or baffled.

And most of the time, we're neither of those. We most likely just nod and say, of course, that confirms our suspicions. But very recently, a discovery was reported that genuinely did baffle and surprise an awful lot of us. I'm talking, of course, about the scientific dating of the Cern Abbas Giant, a 55-metre-high nude chalk figure cut into a hillside in Dorset in southern England. The figure is most famous for the fact that it looks a little bit like a cartoon character, holding...

a large club in his right hand and displaying a very prominent erect penis. Now the reason many of us were baffled is that there was a relatively widespread belief that the figure was carved as late as the 17th century. although some also believed it may have been prehistoric or made in the Roman period. But that was not what the new evidence showed.

In fact, it's been given a new date that opens up a whole new set of interpretations and thoughts about the giant's creation and function. With me today, I'm delighted to have the National Trust archaeologist in charge of the Surnava's dating project, Dr. Martin Papworth, who has agreed to come and talk to me about his organization's biggest member.

Thank you for joining me, Martin. Yeah, good to meet you, Kat. We're going to get back to the actual dates and the actual results in a moment, although seeing as this is a podcast focusing on the medieval period, some of the sort of smart cookies out there might have worked out.

what that might be but I wanted to start a little bit with the background and I wondered Martin for the benefit of those listeners out there who might not have driven down the sort of winding lanes of Royal Dorset and seen him for themselves Could you explain a little bit more about the giant and the setting and whether we have anything else like it in England? We have other chalk figures, but nothing like the Cernapas giant. The two other places you might...

think about in relation to him would be the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire or the Wilmington Long Man in Sussex. But the Uffington White Horse has been dated to the late... Bronze Age, Early Iron Age period. And the Wilmington Longman is thought to be Tudor in date. So of those three, until 2020, CERN ABBA's giant was the one that we didn't really know. Or at least we hadn't taken this opportunity of trying out this optically stimulated luminescence dating technique.

which he had been used on the other two. So if you drive from Dorchester and you're heading to Sherbourne, it's quiet right through the heart of Dorset. And when you get beyond Cern Abbas, you turn into a lay-by, and there he is on a steep... side of a hill and that's the best way of looking at him really. If you went up to him and tried to climb the fence you wouldn't really get any idea of what he looks like. He'd be too giant and you wouldn't be able to see him in any detail.

You feel like you're in the very centre and the heart of rural Dorset. You feel set back in time. It's a very good place to go. So he's really meant to be seen from a distance and seen as you're sort of travelling through, I suppose. He's best seen from the opposite side of the valley on the Sidley.

St. Nicholas Hill, but that's a hard place to get to. But if you're driving along the valley bottom, then there's a special place to stop and look up at him. But you see him at a bit of an angle. He's visible. You can see him reasonably well from there.

And what's in the area? Because it's quite rural, isn't it? Is there a village? Is there anything else? Is there a sort of good reason for having a figure in a place like that? Well, in the medieval period, Cern was a small town. And certainly from the 10th century, there was an important monastery there. established in 987.

But there's evidence or there's some medieval documentation that there was something that predates that monastery as a religious site there, a Christian site there. But he's still in a sort of quiet location, I suppose. So I guess with a bit of a...

modern perspective it doesn't necessarily makes all that much sense but you have led this new project then to date the giant but before that started as you've already mentioned we really didn't know exactly when he dated two but there were quite a lot of different

theories and i was hoping we could just go through some of those so if we start with the oldest so this belief that he might have been prehistoric what was that based on just by the look of him really so above him there is a very interesting to linear earthwork, which is called the Trendle. It has the kind of look of a Romano-British temple. There's a sort of little platform inside it with traces of a building there. So if you were looking at him as being a prehistoric...

or a Roman representation, that would grow quite nicely with the earthwork above him being a temple. I guess, as far as the prehistoric side, he's linked to a Celtic god known as Sir Nunnus.

And I guess it's just the name that links him with that. But if you wanted to link him to a Roman classical god, he looks just like Hercules as he's presented on... sculptures and paintings and carvings yeah so he has a club above his head he has an outstretched arm and some people think that once the figure's been lost now but he's been picked up

slightly on geophysical survey, that across his arm there was a lion's skin or a cloak or something like that, which would be typical of a representation of Hercules. So that's quite an understandable interpretation, I suppose, from a sort of stylistic... perspective yeah but of course the difficulty is because we don't have lots of others of them we can't say

this is what it would have looked like at the time. And then moving sort of forwards a little bit to the most recent assumptions. Now, I remember going on a field trip as an undergrad to see the Sir Nevers Giant and my lecturers... being very convinced that he was made in the 17th century. And that seemed to be quite a sort of common agreement. What does that come from? And why do people think he's that recent? Well, mainly because there's no real historical record of him before 16...

And that reference was found in the church warden's accounts of Cern Abba's parish church. There was a Bristol University lecturer called Joe Betty who went through as many documents as he could possibly find. One of the key bits of evidence was a detailed survey of the manor of CERN, dated 1617. which talked about Trendle Hill and mentioned nothing about the giant. And so coming out from that, they believed that he wasn't there, so that he must be post-1617 and before 1694.

And then they looked at the owners of the land in that period of time. It was held by Sir Thomas Freake, who acquired the property. He died in 1633. And then a man called Denzel Hollis married into the family, married the widow. He was a parliamentarian. He was a bit of a geezer, really. He sort of supported Cromwell. And when it looked like it was better to support the king, he supported the royalist cause and associated.

with his ownership, is a designed landscape garden, the earthworks that can still be seen on the site of the old medieval abbey. There seemed to be 17th century in date. In fact, the Trendle... may have been repurposed as a sort of eye-catcher for that garden. And it may be that he decided to lay out the giant as part of that and to use it as a sort of lampoon of Oliver Cromwell who was... sometimes compared with Hercules. So it's a Renaissance Herculean figure, I suppose. That's that theory.

And then there's another theory that he might be William III, who was often linked with Hercules as well. If you go to Hampton Court Palace, a lot of the representations there of his time are of the labours of Hercules. and William III as a strong defender of the Protestant cause, and he is shown as Hercules on medallions and coins.

Yeah, so there are two theories from the 17th century and owners might give you an explanation of why the giant's there. I mean, they were quite convincing. I remember when I learnt about these, I was relatively convinced of that because... that fact that we have some earlier records

about the location and about the site that don't mention this very striking feature. That to me seemed to be quite a good sort of reason. But could it be that those sort of documents just simply wouldn't have mentioned it? I mean, is it likely there were? documents but that they just wouldn't go into detail well looking at him he's been obvious isn't he

That's the thing, isn't it? I mean, all these, you say, well, yeah, perhaps some things you might overlook, but can you really overlook the St. Abbas giant? Yeah, it's been quite convincing. So, I mean, certainly the more I've looked at him and the more I've looked at the evidence.

I was pretty convinced when we went into the excavation that that's what we'd find, that when we took our samples from the lowest levels that we would find he was... 17th century yeah likewise i was expecting more or less the same well let's get straight to that then actually let's talk about that dating project had anybody actually tried to do any scientific dating of him before this project started no

We wanted to, but every time we got to the point, the money wasn't there. And so I asked again in 2019, because the National Trust was given CERN Giant by the Pitt Rivers family. in 1920 so we were approaching our 100th anniversary of owning the cern giant and in preparation for that we gave him a re-chalking he needs to be re-chalked every 20 years or so

So August that year, he was re-chalked. And I asked Hannah, the general manager, well, could we do it? We're going to have a celebration in July 2020. Couldn't we announce the results of a small excavation, do this OSL dating? And that's when she said, yep, let's go for it. So I went to the site in September that year with Mike Allen, who is an environmental archaeologist, a soil scientist. And he too had been involved with Wilmington and Uffington.

and he wanted to get a date from CERN. So we went up there, climbed over the fence, up to his feet. And we noticed what had happened in the heavy rain since the August re-chalking is that it had washed the soil down his legs. So the chalk had built up into his feet and spilled out over the edge, forming a little terrace. obvious that this had been something that happened for hundreds of years. So if we wanted to find a spot where we could take these samples, it's at the bottom of the feet.

and at the elbows, where there's this sort of build-up on the horizontal and the steep slope of the hill, which follows the contours. It catches the silt as it comes down. and forces the feet to come up and the elbows to come almost to a level. So we went back, went to the pub and hatched our plot in the village. And then in March, we came out to dig our four narrow trenches, our opens, 2.6 metres wide.

two metres long across the outline of the chalk figure. It took us a week and we were going down to catch the lowest level and the earliest re-chalking.

Quite an important point, isn't it? Because what you need, obviously, as you just said, it needs to be sort of rechalked and reworked essentially over time. So what you wanted was to get... right at the earliest possible date for it so the sort of original dating so you had to do the excavations first to get to that level is that right that's right yes how else could we get these samples and we didn't want to take them from one an area that had been dug out and

That's why these locations were really good. Well, the other thing about it was that it was the very last week we could have done it before lockdown. Unexpectedly, normally we wouldn't have dug in March. February had been really, really rainy. And it looked like March wasn't going to be much better, a bit too cold to be on a windy hillside digging a hole. But it worked out all right. And as we drove to the site each day, we could hear...

bits and pieces gradually being shut down around Britain. And in fact, on the Monday following, that's the last time I went into the office for over a year. So we just about did it in time. We found as we went down the different layers, which were very interesting. I've worked on the site for over a quarter of a century, so I could recognise the first three chalkings because I was there. And then we went into a 1978 level. And then we found the kibble chalk that was put in there in 1956.

And then beyond that, we thought we could see 1920s, possibly Pitt Rivers in the late 19th century, that famous archaeologist who owned the site then. He had it re-chalked at that time, by 1897. And we were still going down to other types of compaction and silty layers. And we hit another lumpy chalk layer, which went right down into the chalk.

But that cutting, the earliest cutting into the chalk actually went through a hollow which had been scooped out into all four of our trenches. You could see the same thing happening. And if you imagine it, on a steep hillside like that, when you first create a chalk figure, it's quite easy. You lift the turf and there's not much topsoil. You'll be able to hit the natural chalk and just...

your chalk canvas is inscribed into the chalk natural. But that doesn't last for long. It gets dirty. It fills with weeds and more soil comes down the hillside. And next time you come to re-chalk it, there's lots of soil there. And you soon lose an ability to chalk the natural chalk. You have to bring chalk in to make it white again. And that's what happened. That's what we saw when we were digging.

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So that's quite exciting in itself, really, that the stratigraphy, this layering, is actually telling you so much about the recent history of the site as well and everything that's been done to it. But how on earth do you... date, scientifically date something like this because a chalk figure, chalk cutting is not something that we can

radiocarbon date is it doesn't have anything organic that we can give a certain date to and you did mention the method earlier on but I was hoping you could explain a little bit about what exactly it was you did to get those scientific dates. So normally archaeologists collect finds in layers and we hope to find bits of organic material like charcoal or bone or shell, wood, which we can send for radiocarbon dating.

Or we hoped for different types of pottery that might give a date, but all we had was chalk. All sorts of different types of chalk, but basically chalk. So that's why we used optically stimulated luminescence, OSL for short. which is a way of measuring the last time a piece of soil has seen light. So what's Phil Toms from Gloucestershire University?

did was he'd come and he'd collect samples of soil from our section which we dug down to the lowest level and collected tubes of soil which he could take back to the lab and open in darkroom conditions. So if you're familiar with the way old-fashioned photography worked, in a darkroom you'd open up the film and you'd process it in a darkroom. It's just the same thing with these soil samples. You isolate the quartz in these samples. And those little fragments of quartz collect the light.

And you can measure, like a radiocarbon date, I think, the half light of the exposure of that chalk. The last time it was exposed to light, the radioactive waves it releases. I hope that's about right. But I'm not a physicist, but generally it's measuring how long these samples have been buried for. So we took five samples and one of them didn't have enough quartz in and it couldn't be dated. But the other four did yield dates.

And what were those dates? So you've got this chalk layering, almost like a dam with these silts coming down the hill, going over the top of them. The most recent of these dates, which was still about... 70 centimetres down from the turf on the surface. that date was 1510 to about 1120. So they're broad ranges, and within that broad date round, there's a 66% chance.

of it lying within that from the 12th to the early 16th century so yes they are quite broad but they are you know in all that date range it is medieval, that particular one later medieval. But if you put a central date on that, it was 1250. So the next one down had a similar broad date range. It went from... the 10th century to the about 1300 in the mid date range was 1240. And then we got

a sample from the very bottom chunky chalk that cut into the natural chalk. And that was a date range from 650 AD to 1300. And that gave us a mid-range date range of 980 AD. And then the one filling this scoop into the natural chalk, the very earliest cut into the chalk natural, which the... Earlier data cut through that one. It's all very technical archaeological stuff. In that stratigraphic layer was 700 AD to 1120 AD.

So a mid-range of 905 AD. So that was a surprise. All of them were medieval, and two of them had a Saxon 10th century mid-range date. And that really was... quite staggering wasn't it because that was i mean even you you said yourself you've been working at this site for a very long time and you weren't expecting that no not at all so

trying to sort of pick that apart because it is a really complicated set of results. But what we do know is that it... Definitely cannot be prehistoric or Roman, right? So the sort of earliest possible date for it is about 700? Yes, that's right. So although the bottom chunky chalk layer gave a 650 earlier range... It can't be earlier than 700 AD, which was in this colluvial deposit, that feature cut through. So yes, 700 AD. And certainly Phil Toms, the scientist, said to me, nope.

Nothing earlier than that. It must be at least 700 AD. So as you say, that wipes out the history and Roman interpretations. Yeah, so we can throw that one out the window. And then the rest of the dates are all falling in the medieval period. So this sort of... Early medieval data, I suppose, so from 700 to about 1100, somewhere in that range seems to be the most likely for when this figure originated. Is that the right picture? Yes, that's right. Yeah.

so that's really interesting so that means that the later dates those 17th century dates again are also not right so we are really left with quite a different scenario so Going back then to the interpretation of that, I mean, there are people in the past who have suggested an Anglo-Saxon or early medieval date, aren't there? So what were those theories that might fit with this result? Yes, you have to go back to William of Morne.

who was a 12th century historian writing about 1125, that sort of period. And he describes CERN and he tells the story of St. Augustine who came to Britain and evangelised. Ethelbert of Kent. He said after doing that, he moved out into other parts of Britain and came to Dorset. He came to CERN, he says, and there he found people who practiced paganism.

who laughed at him and really sort of chased him and his monks out of town and then subsequently after prayer augustine returned and they were receptive to the faith And there was a well there, a sacred well, which is now known as St. Augustine's Well. This would be the end of, well, beginning of the 7th century, I suppose. It's that sort of period, except that Dorset was part of the Romano-Romanised.

British world, the sub-Roman world. It wasn't like Eastern Britain, which was part of the Saxon, pagan Saxon area. The people in the west of Britain were Romanised Christian. It doesn't really hold true. As I say, it's a 12th century legend, but the well is still known as St. Augustine's well, and it's a theory that's gone through. And certainly he mentions a god Heal that the local people worshipped.

Or Helith, he's sometimes mentioned. He's a sort of brave warrior sort of god. He doesn't mention the giant. But when the antiquarians came to look at the giant in the 18th century... They picked up on the local stories from the villagers who told him it was Heleth that the giant represented and were convinced that was who he was. There's this idea of religion, of paganism, that this might have been some kind of a representation of an earlier pagan god. And obviously, if...

We look at the very earliest date and we're talking about the sort of early Anglo-Saxon period when religion, paganism versus Christianity is quite a sort of... strong feature of what's going on in the country then perhaps that could sort of fit with that. Obviously there's a monastery as we mentioned earlier that was built in CERN in the late 10th century. If this was some kind of a pagan representation is it like

then that they may have wanted to essentially hide it and to not actually have it on display? Could it be that perhaps it wasn't really quite fitting with local religious beliefs that that's why it's not mentioned? Possibly, but yes. As I say, it does take a lot of effort to keep it visible on the hill. I suppose you can speculate about how things were then. If you ever look at manuscripts, they're beautifully illustrated with all sorts of...

Quite crazy calligraphic figures, aren't they? And if you were to go into a medieval church, it would be gaudy. It would be full of stories from the Bible. There would be great doom illustrations over the charts large. So in that sort of context, we often imagine the insides of churches as quite plain, whitewashed places, but they only really got like that in the dissolution in the 16th century. Before that, you see these...

gothic carvings in churches, don't you? And I guess in that kind of context, you might imagine that they would use a figure on a hillside like that as some kind of parable, some kind of way of telling a story. I'm just struggling here. try and put the two side by side. You know, it was a big monastery full of holy men, and beside it was the St. Abbas Giant. It's that sort of context you'd have to try and explore. But these dates are quite new, so...

It's quite hard to get your head around it, really. Absolutely. I've been following this quite carefully. I know a lot of my colleagues who work on this period are extremely interested in trying to identify it. And there's a few suggestions that have come up on social media, especially. One of them from one of my colleagues was suggesting that this could be an Anglo-Saxon depiction.

of Saint Edward, who was the local saint of CERN. And he was a hermit saint who was wandering in search of a place called Silver Fountain. And he actually fixed his staff at the top of a sloping cliff. This then turned... green and sprouted leaves and he found a spring flowing down and made his hermitage there. And the suggestion is in that club is actually his staff.

rather than a sort of Hercules-type club, and that this is the local saint. I mean, how do you think that fits into the picture? Yes, I like that. And another suggestion from another colleague as well was that, in fact, any sort of foliage growing from, you know, you plant...

anything growing on it could make it seem like this was sort of sprouting that perhaps there was even a tree or something like that that this was associated with but as I said I know colleagues aren't discussing this very much And of course, there's nothing to say that he hasn't been altered later on. He may have looked slightly different. As I say, our trenches were only in his elbows and his feet.

Not in his club. His club might have been changed. Other parts of him might have been changed. Yeah, and in fact, you've got some more evidence, haven't you, that he might have been altered slightly. I was looking at the results from all your press releases and things, and one of the... you did was you looked at some lidar so laser imagery of the giant and that also had some quite interesting results i believe yes that's right yeah we commissioned this drone footage

which picks up very faint traces of undulations in the ground. What this showed was that he has a belt but the belt is interrupted by his penis. But actually, this LiDAR shows very faint trace of the line continuing. So his penis might be an add-on. It might be a later thing. And so if that's the case, his... Other parts of him, like the club, may have been altered to make him look more like Hercules than he was meant to originally.

And aren't there also some early illustrations of him where he has a belly button? So actually, so that the penis is much smaller and less prominent, and then there's a belly button. That's right, yes. It's quite possible then, isn't it, that that particular feature of his...

anatomy has been extended, so to speak. Yes, that's right. That's supposed to have happened in the early 20th century when the workman did a re-talking and just joined him up. So could it then be that we are looking at an early medieval Anglo-Saxon figure that might have... had some local significance maybe a local saint whether it was a sort of christian figure or a pagan figure we don't know but then actually later on maybe even from the 17th century onwards

He was being altered, he was being changed to fit sort of new narratives and new ideas. And then somehow in the meantime, he was kind of forgotten about. Yes, I like that idea. Certainly, I was very interested, you know, that there was... Certainly from the archaeology, it looked like after his initial creation, there had been a period of some time when he had been allowed to grow over, and he was only later reinstated.

So I could imagine that for a while he could well have been hardly visible at all. And then he perhaps could be seen in low sunlight. At some stage, they decided to reinstate him. And of course, I suppose if you have a saint, you know, the medieval period was very much about pilgrimage, wasn't it? To go to the saint's shrine. And to have an emblem on a hillside to that saint would be sort of a good advertisement that you were there. Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's a nice theory.

It's always good, isn't it, to try and put things together. You can't be certain about them, but yeah, that would add up, wouldn't it, I think. I think that works quite nicely. And it's nice as well because it shows how different generations, different...

people who have been part of the sort of Son Abbas and that part of Dorset have clearly had a different relationship. I mean, we have a relationship with him now and people come and see him and you work on the site. But then, you know, going back through time, back to perhaps the same...

hundreds. Other people, he's had a different meaning in different time periods and different relevance, I suppose. Yes, that's right. I think people in different generations and different outlooks have interpreted him in a way that suits them.

I think, and comforts them or inspires them. These many things to many people, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Now, is there any more work planned now that you've got these results or is this it now? I think we need some more money. So we're going to, but I think we're going to get it. Certainly Mike Allen has a lot more to do on the soils and understanding how those soils were deposited.

It looks at some stage as though the hillsides have been ploughed. There's a lot of very coarse material. It wasn't turf at that time. He's also identified tiny micro snail shells, which show the different... environment at different times, and some of the snails are only introduced to Britain in the medieval period.

I think we can add to that. Another thing is there's a part of me that doesn't quite believe these OSL dates. So I'm going to get another couple done. I spoke to Phil Toms this morning and he said we're going to check a couple that we know the date of. as a control. I just want to be 100%. So there is still a small chance. This is a niggle of doubt. Is that right? I think I have a niggle of doubt. I want to be reassured. It's because I haven't used OSL dates very often.

So I guess I'm a more radiocarbon bloke, really. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah, it does sound a little bit like magic, I think, that you can expose to see when stones raise space. I do understand the science, but still, I do understand. But, I mean, it is a really fascinating discovery and then a result, and I think...

it's made a lot of people really think about the early medieval context of the site clearly there is a lot going on there and there's a lot more to rediscover so it'll be really interesting to follow this as we go and see how the specialists

in this region and this period add to that interpretation. I personally think that even though there might be some doubts, maybe, it's a really fantastic new discovery and I think it does definitely fit in with some theories about what happens there in the early medieval. period. So it'd be great to hear what my colleagues continue to work on and perhaps we can get someone back to try and do another interpretation of it.

Martin this really is a very fantastic new discovery. Thank you so much for coming along and talking about it today. Lovely to speak to you Kat. If anyone finds themselves on holiday driving through Dorset, if you haven't seen the Cernabas giant for yourself before, do please make a stop and have a look. Definitely going to have to go back and see him again. That reaches the end of this episode.

gone medieval I'm Dr Kat Jarman and I'm going to be back next week with more medieval stories but in the meantime please do spread the word if you enjoyed listening to this episode do leave us a review and subscribe if you haven't already done so to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Trimble knows that in the industries we all depend on, where speed counts, every turn matters.

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