A reading list for one figure.
Every long-form piece on the site, ordered by thread. Read in order, or pick the angle you came here for.
History
The first written record.
John Rowley’s 1710 sketch and the silence that surrounds it. Why the figure may have stood unrecorded for centuries.
Priory and parish.
Wilmington Priory, the medieval estate, and how the figure fits (or doesn’t) into the documentary boundary record.
Watkins, Cuming and the long Edwardian look.
How the antiquarians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reshaped the figure in their own image.
Mythology
The giant on the hill.
Folk identifications: Saxon warlord, Roman standard-bearer, prehistoric shaman, pilgrim with two staves. Where the stories came from.
Two staves, one door.
The figure’s posture as a doorway, a threshold, a measure. A reading that pulls together folk and ritual evidence.
The pilgrim and the road.
How the figure was re-folded into Christian topography in the medieval and early-modern period — and what didn’t survive.
Archaeoastronomy
The summer solstice line.
Sightlines from the figure’s position to the solstice sunrise, and why the orientation of the staves may not be incidental.
Equinox shadow, Imbolc light.
The cross-quarter days and the curious behaviour of the hill’s own shadow at certain times of year.
Lunar standstills.
The 18.6-year lunar cycle and what it would have meant for someone laying out a figure on this slope.
Or just read the book.
All three threads, fully argued, with the maps and photographs.