Читать книгу A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside - Johnny Scott - Страница 8

Our Bronze Age and Iron Age ancestors were among the most diligent of landscape enhancers, compulsively building henges, erecting megaliths and carving hill figures where the colour of the chalk or limestone substrata would show up in contrast with the green of the surrounding sward. Undoubtedly the most famous of these is the White Horse of Uffington, high on an escarpment of the Berkshire Downs below Whitehorse Hill, a mile and a half south of the village of Uffington, looking out over the Vale of the White Horse.

For a piece of artwork which optically stimulated luminescence dating has proved to be 3,000 years old, the highly stylised curving design is extraordinarily contemporary. It was either the late Bronze Age or early Iron Age occupants of the adjacent Uffington Castle hill fort who devoted the immense amount of time, organisation and effort required to carve the no-metre creature into the hillside and, despite endless hypotheses, no one really knows why. From my perspective, you only have to look at it for an explanation: the horse is a thing of beauty, young, sleek and vibrant, lunging forward with neck arched and forefeet raised, a picture of health and vitality. The carving was deliberately constructed just below the summit where it would be visible to other hill-top settlements and the horse triumphantly shouts a message from his tribe across the wooded valleys: ‘Look at me!’ The horse rejoices, ‘Am I not magnificent? See how beautiful and fertile my hill is.’

Unless the substrata was regularly kept exposed, a hill carving would disappear back into the ground within a decade and there will have been hundreds of them dotted around the uplands which are now lost to us. The two Plymouth Hoe Giants, visible until the early seventeenth century, are an example, or the Firle Corn, a nearly lost hill figure on Firle Beacon, in Sussex, now looking more like a small ear of corn or a strange weapon than a human figure, whose existence can only be seen by infrared photography. What is so remarkable about the Uffington Horse is that for over thirty centuries whenever the turf looked like growing over it the local people have always cleared it away. Long after the original architects had passed on and whatever religious, totemic or cultural significance attached to the carving had been forgotten, successive generations have preserved the carving through all vicissitudes, simply because they liked having the horse on their hill and felt it looked better with it, rather than without it.

Some hill figures have been resurrected by nineteenth-and twentieth-century archaeologists – whose enthusiasm has almost certainly changed the original outlines. The Long Man of Wilmington is one, a familiar figure to me after my father moved from Cowden to Eckington Manor, in the village of Ripe, overlooking the broad sweep of the South downs in Sussex. The Long Man of Wilmington, or the Wilmington Giant, is a 70-metre-high figure holding what appear to be two staves on either side of him, cut into the downland turf on the slope of Windover Hill, between two spurs of lands that face north towards the weald. He is one of the largest such representations of a man anywhere in the world, beaten only by the Attacama Giant in Chile.

The origins of the Long Man have been the subject of endless debate, ranging from a heretical image carved by a secret occult sect of the monks of Wilmington Priory during the Middle Ages; a Celtic sun god opening the dawn portals and letting the ripening light of spring flood through, a Roman standard bearer, or a deeply symbolic prehistoric fertility symbol. Adherents to this line of thought maintain the Long Man is a reversed version of the priapic Cerne Abbas Giant and that the slope on which the old boy has been carved resembles a vulva. There is also a relatively recent theory which claims the Long Man is a sixteenth-century fake, based on carbon dating chalk rubble washed down to the foot of Windover Hill. In my view, this lacks about as much credibility as some of the more ludicrous speculation about the carving’s conception. I have no doubt that the Long Man was made by the late Bronze or early Iron Age tribesmen who occupied a substantial settlement on the summit of Windover Hill. This area is a rich source of archaeological remains, with numerous impressive high-status burial sites from different ages, lynchets or earth banks created by Celtic farming and several flint mines. Although flint was of principal importance to Neolithic people, it continued to be highly valued during successive periods of history.

THE EARLIEST-KNOWN SKETCH OF THE LONG MAN DATES FROM 1710 WHEN A SURVEYOR, JOHN ROWLEY, WAS HIRED TO MAP THE DUKE OF DEVONSHIRE’S SUSSEX ESTATES. ROWLEY’S DRAWING SHOWS THE LANKY MAN, LONE MAN OR GREEN MAN, AS HE WAS KNOWN LOCALLY THEN, AS A FAINT, FIZZY OUTLINE ON THE SWARD WITH A CONICAL HEAD AND BULGES WHERE HIS EARS SHOULD BE.

The earliest-known sketch of the Long Man dates from 1710 when a surveyor, John Rowley, was hired to map the Duke of Devonshire’s Sussex estates. Rowley’s drawing shows the Lanky Man, Lone Man or Green Man, as he was known locally then, as a faint, fizzy outline on the sward with a conical head and bulges where his ears should be. He is forward facing, with eyes, nose and mouth marked; the body is bulky and symmetrical with a posture which holds a hint of challenge or confrontation. The outline was changed and, no doubt, many of the original features lost in 1874 when the Reverend W. de St Croix of the Sussex Archaeological Society persuaded the Duke of Devonshire to fund a project to clear the turf back to the chalk and fill the trench with yellow bricks. At the time, the Duke remonstrated with de St Croix that the bricks didn’t fit the original outline and very little had been achieved of the purpose of the project. The original yellow bricks have been replaced on a number of occasions, the last time in 1969, none of which have followed the previous outlines and each has altered the Long Man’s shape slightly.

Why did the ancients carve a giant man there? I believe, as with the White Horse, they were broadcasting pride of ownership of that particular hill settlement. One thing is certain, the lovely curvature of the Downs and the uniform, slightly convex slope between the two almost identical spurs on which the Long Man has been carved would pass completely unnoticed if he wasn’t there. All the hill carvings, the few ancient ones which have survived or been resurrected and the many that were created in the nineteenth century during the great era of naturalist landscape design, draw the eye to a pleasing feature of landscape.