I Ob THE GIANT AND THE MAYPOLE OF CERNE. 



But, after the advent of Charles II., the maypole was set up 

 again and had a long life. Robert Childs, the present sexton, 

 well remembers it. " It was made," he says, " every year from a 

 fir-bole, and was raised in the night. It was erected in the 

 ring just above the Giant. It was decorated, and the villagers 

 went up the hill and danced round the pole on the ist of 

 May." 



The fact just mentioned deserves especial notice. Cerne had 

 been a busy town, and had some sort of market-place, as well as 

 a village green. But the maypole was set up in neither of these 

 places, but nearly half a mile away, on the top of a very steep 

 hill, " in the ring just above the Giant." (See figure B.) This 

 ring is of a rhomboidal shape, an approximate square, each side 

 measuring about 120 feet, or, according to Hutchins, no feet. 

 On the opposite side of the valley, on Black Hill, is another 

 " square camp." Two similar camps were excavated by the late 

 General Pitt- Rivers, and of these that at South Lodge is 150 

 feet square and that on Handley Hill 108 feet square. 



No iron was found in them, but bronze implements and 

 weapons in abundance, with tools of horn and flint, and frag- 

 ments of pottery that revealed a continued occupation into 

 Romano-British times. Now, if exploration has assigned such 

 rhomboidal camps to the Bronze Age, it has proved with equal 

 certitude that a very large proportion of the barrows of Dorset 

 also belonged to that period of civilization. 



Has the Cerne Giant a like affinity ? Or is it mediaeval, or 

 even modern ? But it cannot be modern, because William 

 Stukeley described it as ancient in a paper, not hitherto pub- 

 lished, but now given as an appendix, which he read to the 

 Society of Antiquaries in 1764 (23). And, assuredly, few persons 

 can believe that it is mediaeval, the work of monks, though they 



(23) This paper is preserved iii the Minute Book of the Society of Anti- 

 quaries, Vol. IX. , p. 233. The Cerne Giant is not mentioned by Stukeley in his 

 works, "Itinerarum Curiosum," 1724; " Palseographia Britannica," 1743; 

 " Itinerarum Curiosum Centuria," 1776. 



