Is The Long Man of Wilmington From Faery?
Notes from East Sussex, England
Long Man of Wilmington
Coordinates: 50°48′36′′N 0°11′17′′E
We have ourselves been to East Sussex, in the Southeast of England. And we have seen— from the vale where Vanessa Bell’s Bloomsbury house Charleston sits—the Long Man of Wilmington. He is very long, as though a stick-figure drawn by a child, and appears carved out of the hillside, the cut deep through the dark green of thick mossy grass straight into the chalky under-earth. The Seven Sisters is not far from his location: those brilliant, white, undulating cliffs we see in English TV and film, which are often mistaken for Dover. So, we reason, it is entirely possible that one could carve down far enough and reach Jurassic chalk, as it is assumed someone once did very long ago.
The Man was once thought to originate in the Iron Age or earlier Neolithic period, and the modern-day figure we see now is actually formed from white-painted breeze blocks and lime mortar—like an embossed relief; though it was probably initially carved out of the hillside— like an engraving.
The Man is 235 feet (72 m) tall, holds two "staves", and is designed to look in proportion when viewed from below, which is how he is mostly seen. There are times when you are driving round the area that he pops into view from the road, much like the Uffington White Horse in Oxfordshire (another famous ancient, stick-figury chalk figure, at the eastern entrance to the Cotswolds, which flies by, high above you, when you are on the road leading to William and Jane Morris’ home of Kelmscott).
The Litlington White Horse is yet another chalk hill figure depicting a horse, situated just three miles from the Long Man, on Hindover Hill in the South Downs, looking over the River Cuckmere. This is the river that runs down to the beach from which one can gaze up marveling at the Seven Sisters. But it is the Man with which we are concerned.
He has a few “alternative” names, such as the Wilmington Giant. Locally, he was often referred to as The Green Man. It is this name which interests us, for it is also a common moniker for a male faery.
The origin of the Long Man remains unclear, though the origin of Faery on the English/Scottish/Welsh/Irish Isles is not. For many years the earliest known record of the Man was a drawing made by William Burrell when he visited Wilmington Priory, near Windover (or Wind-door) Hill, in 1766. Windover means wind-door, and the door to Faery is no secret amongst these parts.
Artist and author Cicely Mary Barker (b. 1895) recounts in detail in her “How to Find Flower Fairies” book, where to look in the village of Alfriston for the Little Folk—Alfriston being the next town over from Firle and Willmington, at the head of the Cuckmere River.
An early suggestion, sometimes stated to be a local tradition, was that the Long Man had been cut by monks from nearby Wilmington Priory, and represented a pilgrim, but this was not widely believed by antiquarians, who felt that monks were unlikely to have depicted an unclothed figure. Until fairly recently the Long Man was most commonly asserted to have been cut in the Neolithic period, primarily due to the presence of a long barrow nearby (those half-moon or straight mounds of grass which house the dead of long-ago).
But Archaeological work performed in 2003 by Martin Bell, professor at the University of Reading, strongly suggests the 16th or 17th century is likely. Meaning: thee Long Man might actually be a Tudor or Stuart-era political satire in the manner recently posited for the Cerne Abbas giant, or possibly a religious image associated with the Reformation (see Hilary Mantel’s Cromwell novels). We know that Faery is a realm that continued to exist in both Catholic and Protestant cultures all over the Isles. In his graphic comic “The Sandman #19” (1990), Neil Gaiman interprets the figure as the guardian of a gateway into Faery. His faeries, like those of Susanna Clarke, are often malevolent tricksters, mischievous creatures who lure humans into their ambiguous realm.
For much of its history, the Man—like faeries themselves—existed only as a shadow or indentation in the grass, visible after a light fall of snow or as a different shade of green in summer: it is described or illustrated as such in the 18th and 19th centuries by viewers. The current outline of the Long Man is largely the result of a 'restoration' of 1873-4, when a group led by the vicar of Glynde, Reverend William de St Croix, marked out the outline with yellow bricks whitewashed and cemented together.
The last time we saw the Long Green Faery Man, we were pulled over the side of the road near someone’s pony paddock, on the way to visiting Charleston House. The morning was misty and dim. It was Easter Sunday. The bells in Duncan Grant’s church rang out and all else was still. Even the Man, taking his long step (forward, sideways?), seemed frozen in time.
On 27 January 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown in England, a face mask was painted on to the Long Man. We hope we get to see it this way, next time we are visiting England; and we wonder if all the faeries, in the Otherworld, are wearing face masks now, too?
- The Editors