Bog Myrtle & Peat

Our first approach was dank and dull in the holloway. The air was cool, and our heads overhung by splays of hazel and hart’s tongue as we walked from the car to the hill. Then breaking through into sudden sunshine, we were free to chase butterflies along the heavy, sliding slope where the chalk giant lies at Cerne Abbas. The big man was sprawled in copious exposure on the soft autumnal slope, and grasshoppers rose before us like the crest of a driven wave. We walked and talked, and then the day was brought to an abrupt pause by the discovery of a beetle that we had never seen before; it was bigger than my son’s thumb, and he shrieked accordingly. 

The soil in Dorset is rich, and the vegetation had a proportionately prosperous, swaggering bent in the morning. Laced with eyebright and strands of gaudy betony, we had found another expression of the old, outrageous South to match the prim and comfortable drone of choir practice which rose from a tidy little church. Cerne Abbas is a Wessex idyll of thatch, waterpumps and timber-frame buildings, but it’s hard to overlook the fact that cleanly laid cobbles and the echoed ring of carthouses belong to a netherworld of crushing grips and sweaty backs. It’s an irony of the English rural scene that villages which were designed to work and be worked by hand have fallen at last into the grasp of the weak and elderly. Behind the byres which used to ring to the heft and grind of milk churns, there are now fig-leaved vines and range rovers which drip for the sake of pointless and repeated washing.

It’s sweet and dear terrain, but all the blood and passion of Cerne Abbas has teemed away down neatly rustic drains; if a drove of cows was pressed through a village like this on its way to market, the animals would shit and bellow, pulling hollyhocks from the tidily kept gardens. The community council would be up in arms, because Dorset’s only certain kinds of Thomas Hardy country, and what remains can feel thin and tinted golden, like a world seen through a werther’s original wrapper.

In this light, perhaps the better-heeled inhabitants of Cerne Abbas should be frightened of the giant who lounges so demonstratively on the hill above the church. He’s waving a club, and his naked pizzle is thirty feet long. He’s a rowdy expression of an awkward truth, and at least he has the decency to keep himself out of sight behind the trees. As my son and I climbed to the top of Giant Hill in a tangle of sucking bees and saucy, restive flowers, we could see the village laid out in gentle plan beneath us. Cerne Abbas is endlessly present in this Giant’s world, but he is an optional angle for the people who live nearby. It’s too easy to stand in the village and pretend that he belongs to some unrelated tradition. And if it seems like I’m fixated by an engagement with grit and brightness, you can’t blame me for having high hopes for a Saxon fertility spirit in the heart of Hardy’s Wessex. But like the Kirkcudbright Artist’s Town where property is now priced so cleverly that no artists can afford to live there, the buck and roughage of this vital place has all but winnowed away in a slump of comfort and elasticated waistbands.

Now that this giant has been blessed and canonised by the National Trust, there is an identifiable space in village life for a giant cock-and-balls – but the people of Cerne Abbas have not explored this theme in any additional detail. There are a few “cheeky” teatowels for sale in the window of a tourist shop, but there is no undue emphasis on phalluses here; no pursuit of animal instincts or moans of lascivious desire. There is a massive willy on the hill above the village, but it’s nothing like a subject of discussion for Jeremy or Rupert as they shuffle home from the village shop with copies of the Daily Telegraph tucked under their arms. Yes, there’s a massive willy, but there’s no need to make a fuss about it – even though it seems to be the only willy in this gelded rural scene.