There's a man carved into a Dorset hillside who has been showing off for about a thousand years. The Cerne Abbas Giant. Fifty-five metres of chalk, a club in one hand, and absolutely nothing in the way of clothing. You can probably picture him. Most people can.
Back in 2022 we went looking for him from the air. It was a Compton Abbas run, Caz in the right seat and David along for the ride, and somewhere in the plan I'd decided we'd go and find the famous chap on the hill. The one with a big 'club' Spotting a chalk figure from a Cessna sounds easy. It is not. You're craning over the glareshield, trying to match a lumpy green hillside to a picture in your head, while also, you know, flying the aeroplane. We found him in the end. He's hard to miss once you're in the right valley, which is sort of his whole point.
He's in the news this week because the National Trust is giving him a freshen-up. It seems that wetter winters have been washing the chalk off the slope and letting the algae move in, so he's been looking a bit green and faded. Around 300 volunteers are hauling something like 17 tonnes of fresh chalk up a one-in-three hill, by hand, in the heat, to pack his outline back to a crisp white. The last touch-up was only seven years ago. He usually gets a decade between coats.
Which raises a question I keep coming back to. How does the Trust find that many people who actively want to spend a day polishing up a giant? Hundreds of them. There's a lottery for the privilege. I suppose that's what they mean by chalking it up to experience.
Here's the bit that makes me smile though. He's a thousand years old and they're still touching him up, still keeping him sharp, still not letting him fade into the hillside. Sound familiar? We say it all the time round here. We never stop learning, and the day we do is the day we should stop flying. Turns out the same goes for ancient chalk giants. You don't get to coast on a thousand years of reputation. You keep doing the work, or you go green.
Hope he enjoys the new chalk. Hope he's still up there glaring out across Dorset in another thousand years.
You can watch our original hunt for him here: Elstree to Compton Abbas, looking for a Giant with a Knobbly Stick.
