Wilmington, E. Sussex - The Long Man - Judges postcard

Postcard
• Picture / Image:  The Long Man, Wilmington, East Sussex
• Publisher:  Judges (C 665)
• Postally used:  no
• Stamp:  n/a
• Postmark(s): n/a
• Sent to:  n/a
• Notes / condition: 

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Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information (internal links may not  work) :

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The Long Man of Wilmington is a hill figure located in Wilmington, East Sussex, England, on the steep slopes of Windover Hill, 9.6 kilometres (6 mi) northwest of Eastbourne. It was formerly often known as the Wilmington Giant, or locally as the Green Man. The Long Man is 69.2 metres (227 ft) tall, holds two ""staves"", and is designed to look in proportion when viewed from below. Formerly thought to originate in the Iron Age or even the neolithic period, more recent archaeological work has shown that the figure may have been cut in the Early Modern era – the 16th or 17th century AD.

The Long Man is one of two main extant human hill figures in England; the other is the Cerne Abbas Giant, north of Dorchester. Both are Scheduled Ancient Monuments. Two other hill figures that include humans are the Osmington White Horse and the Fovant regimental badges. The Long Man is one of two hill figures in East Sussex, the other being the Litlington White Horse.

The origin of the Long Man remains unclear. For many years the earliest known record was in a drawing made by William Burrell when he visited Wilmington Priory, near Windover (or Wind-door) Hill, in 1766. Burrell's drawing shows the figure holding a rake and a scythe, both shorter than the present staves.^[1] However, in 1993, a new drawing was discovered in the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth House: this had been made by the surveyor John Rowley in 1710, now the first definite date on which the figure is known to have existed.^[2]

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 created an unclothed figure.^[3] Up 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, or given an Iron Age attribution based on a perceived similarity to other hill figures.^[4] Professor John North wrote that during the centuries around 3480 BC the figure would have been positioned to mark the constellation Orion's movement across the ridge above it. The figure, according to this interpretation, may have been a manifestation of a Neolithic astral religion.^[5] Another suggestion was that the figure had a Romano-British provenance, while an origin in the time of Anglo-Saxon England gained credence after the 1965 discovery at Finglesham in Kent of an Anglo-Saxon brooch depicting a figure, (possibly Odin), holding two spears in a similar fashion to the Long Man.

Recent archaeological work done by Professor Martin Bell of the University of Reading, in association with Aubrey Manning's Open University programme Landscape Mysteries, has strongly suggested that the figure dates from the Early Modern period – the 16th or 17th century AD.^[6] Bell found that the slope on which the Long Man was cut had gone through a period of instability in this time, after a very long prior period of stability, suggesting that the figure was first cut then.^[4] This has opened up the possibility that the Long Man could 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: Professor Ronald Hutton noted that ""we can at least celebrate the fact that we have our first, apparently unequivocally, Early Modern hill figure, and historians now have to reckon with it"".^[4]

type=printed postcards

theme=topographical: british

sub-theme=england

county/ country=sussex

number of items=single

period=1945 - present

postage condition=unposted