Читать книгу Crap Days Out - Gareth Rubin - Страница 12

It’s an odd idea: come to visit something you can’t actually see unless you are 130ft tall. Is anyone that tall? We’re not; not even combined. So unless you are on the world’s highest and most precarious pair of stilts, clinging on for dear life and screaming that you have changed your mind about all this, you’re just not going to see either of these two chalk outline figures very slightly carved out of the grass.

No one is sure if the white horse is even a horse. It might be a dog or a sparrow or something. Intriguingly, the ancient … well, whoever it was who marked out the unidentified creature, left one leg floating away from the rest of his body, rather like Penfold’s eyebrows in Danger Mouse.

And just what it is doing there on the side of a hill is also a bit sketchy. Some historians say it was carved in celebration of King Alfred’s victory over the Danes in AD 871:

‘Nice one, Alfred. So, how do you fancy celebrating?’

‘I want a sodding massive white horse carved into a hill.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

Then there’s that giant. No one would dispute that children love giants – they go ape-shit for them. They are, after all, GIANTS. But aside from the anger, the smashing things etc., the point about giants is that they’re supposed to be more visible than ordinary people, not less. So kids won’t find this giant exciting unless they want their heads examined – which, of course, they might do after they fall off those massive stilts of yours. Honestly, I don’t know why you brought them.

No one knows the reason for the giant’s existence, either, although it might have been carved to annoy Oliver Cromwell who was known to have an aversion to giants with clubs.

But the most interesting thing about the Cerne Abbas Giant is the size of his weapon. A euphemism? You betcha. If you like your giants with huge erect penises, this is certainly the giant for you. On the other hand, in these paranoid times, visiting the Cerne Abbas Giant with children – especially those to whom you are not directly related – is fraught with the distinct possibility that the wrong word could land you on the sex offenders register.