About the project
and the person behind it.
A site built around one stubborn question, written from one corner of East Sussex.
A companion to the book.
This site exists for one reason: to give the book somewhere to breathe. The Long Man is a figure that rewards being looked at from many angles — in archive paper, in folk speech, in the geometry of the hill at sunrise — and a printed page can only ever do so much of that at once.
Here you will find the longer photographs that didn’t fit between the covers, the maps with their working drawn in, side-essays that wandered too far from the main thread, and the occasional field note from a return visit. The book is the spine; the site is everything that grew off it.
It is built deliberately quiet — no pop-ups, no auto-playing video, no list of things you should buy. Read at your own pace.
Stuart, who wrote it — and kept walking back.
Stuart has spent the better part of two decades walking and re-walking the chalklands of southern England, returning to the Long Man more often than to anywhere else. The book is the result of that returning — field journals, archive trips, slow afternoons watching the figure’s own shadow, and the long correspondence with the antiquarians and astronomers who’d been there before him.
By training he is neither an archaeologist nor an astronomer, which has turned out to be useful: it means the questions he keeps asking are the ones a careful walker asks, and the answers he draws together come from many disciplines that don’t always speak to each other.
He writes from Wilmington and Lewes. Letters and corrections welcome — the Long Man is a generous subject and there is always more to learn.
Read the book.
A complete reckoning, in one volume.