A Horse Path

Staying Power: The Giant at Cerne

by Sue Clifford, founder director, Common Ground

A contribution to The Cerne Giant, an antiquity on Trial
23 March 1996 at Cerne Abbas Village Hall, Dorset. 

For me the Cerne Giant attracts and emanates a cluster of meanings, only some of which I can articulate, all of which lead me to question upon question.

presence, persistence, paradox and poetry.

He is a giant. He diminishes all of us. He is a giant, a figure of the imagination. He is a giant, all over the world his stories are told again and again.

While we did not give him life, it is only through us that he lingers, if he had no meaning to us he would not be here. Yet all he is, is an absence of turf - and he is dynamic, active, vital.

presence

Many giants populate our land, but rare it is that we can see them. Here above Cerne significance clings to a figure carved into the land.

Possibly here lies the sheep stealing giant slain by the locals, his outline then traced as though the CID had visited the scene of the crime. Or maybe this is an ancient sacred figure from which have grown tales of giants walking these hills and vales. Is he symbol of fertility, or of regeneration? There is something of the Green Man about him: is his club indicative of the Holly Knight, waiting to do battle with the Oak King, the seasonal round, the story of cyclical displacement and recurrence, time endlessly rolling rather than flying fast forward as we would have it. Or is this a fearsome frown on the brow of the hill to frighten Civil War soldiers from stealing from the fields, signifying the superiority of the Club Risers (labourers and others who banded together to protect their crops in this part of the world). Or is this Hercules, a refugee from the Mediterranean sun? Perhaps simply what we have here is 'Billboard Willie', a great poster announcing cudgel games at Revels Farm over the hill The richness for me is in all these possibilities and more. I want to engage with this character, I respect him as a store full of memories, facts to be discovered, a cue for legends to be retold, myths to be fathomed, old and new rituals to be performed. I do not need to know a definitive beginning. (I fear it may mark his end, cut and dried, mystery dessicated and blown away on the wind).

persistence

Our relationship with nature and the land... is not so much about how things look or how old they are, but how we know them, how the place makes us feel. A place means something to us partly through the accumulation of stories. I wonder what local people know and feel? What presence does he exert in the everyday? Do you need definitive answers and if so why? Or if like me you are fed by compound cues, proud to pass on multiple speculations.

The thrill the Giant offers is surely in his very enigma, and his challenge is to demand we keep faith with the locality in passing on the intertwining tales - fantastical and academical. For, if all we see is him, I sense-he will be disappointed. He is a figure in this landscape. He is tied to this soil, and, he particularises this place. He also carries a weight of symbolisms in the wider world.

I can add a new sense of him for the next century - my eyes go both to the fine grain and to the backdrop against which all our lives are played. I can muse upon fertility - of the soil into which he is cut.  

And I am drawn to paradox: the very fragility, the potentially ephemeral nature of his power, and yet the defiant persistence. He needs us for his continuity, if we want a rich landscape, significant to us, if we want fertility to be sustained, to be able to work with nature's generous regenerative capacities, then perhaps we have to take more care of the stories and work better to sustain the place.

While the Giant may carry memory, he is not a thing of the past, he is continuing history; he exists now, he belongs to us here, if he ceases to mean anything to us (if we don't remake his significance for ourselves) he will not endure.

So one important role is that of making me look at the land... he is, after all rivetted to it, he is scored into chalk, he makes me stare at a hillside.

Within the expanse of land that he inhabits, there are remnants of hard work of many ages, ancient and modern field systems jostling with tracks and paths and roads and boundaries all tumbling together, and the map reveals an extraordinary cruciform confluence of valleys, in and above which layer upon layer of habitation, subsistence and existence has been drawn. Our forbears knew the land; the giant's domain, His view is over an intimacy of valleys (collective noun), wonderfully complicated habitats, habitation and history, his presence enhances, but without him there is power in this place.

Why is he here? Is there something about this place that we are missing because our attention is so focussed upon the Giant himself?

In gleaning for possible answers, it becomes of interest to have an idea of when he appeared and through whose works... but to me it is of even greater importance to know why he has persisted. He must, like the Cheshire cat, have faded and brightened, but the secret of his perpetuation is not in his own magic, it is in the hands of the people of this place. His story, however long, could be recorded as a document of social decision making, he only exists because people here have wanted him to be here, and have worked to keep him.

This is a remarkable fact, and one which has poignant resonances for the National Trust. His life in whose hands? My hope is that his future will be part of the cultural common of this place, the National Trust may be the Lord of the Manor, capable of acting in loco parentis in times of trouble. But to keep the Giant in good heart, and perhaps the people and this place as well, it is my contention that they and the Giant should maintain their intimacy, they should know why they want him here now, and should make decisions and act together accordingly. This is what the 21st century could be about, decisions and actions locally accomplished, responsibility shared, democracy democratised, nature and culture constantly reworked to maintain local distinctiveness. We, strangers the Giant has the capacity to draw from beyond, need the integrity and authenticity which that reality would sustain.

paradox and poetry

More precise than longitude and latitude, the coordinates here, are met in the Cerne Giant, he particularises this place. This figure, like many other aspects of our landscape, is far from being merely figurative. The Land is our most elaborate storyboard. That we cannot precisely read it or translate the contradictions, leaves room for us all to join in the telling: layers of meaning, tangles of ambiguity, overlays of possibility, a great weaving of significances. Adding to the depth of knowledge must never narrow our imagination... it is this which created the giant in the first place.

If we are to apprehend any thing from the compression of history, it surely must be that facts and the quest for facts, can only get us so far, and that out of wisdom, not just knowledge, we have to leam again to confront paradox with poetry: a delicate Herculean task.

From "The Cerne Giant, an Antiquity on Trial" ed. Darvill, Baker, Bender & Hutton

At the top of the page, a photo of the giant flanked by an illustration by Anne Bowes and a coy emasculation from the 18th century.

CHALK