Free Republic

...The earliest recorded mention of the Cerne Abbas Giant, which was gifted to the National Trust in 1920 by the Pitt-Rivers family, was in 1694. Local folklore has long held the 180ft (55m) chalk man to be a fertility aid. Early antiquarians linked the giant with the Anglo-Saxon deity Helis, others have said he is the classical hero Hercules, while some believe he was carved during the English Civil War as a parody of Oliver Cromwell. A further layer of mystery was revealed in the 1980s when a survey showed anomalies that suggested he originally wore a cloak and stood...

The Rude Man of Cerne, better known as the Cerne Abbas Giant, is a giant figure of a naked man with an inappropriately erect phallus, wielding a primitive club in his right hand, made on a hill near the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, England. The Cerne Abbas Giant was created by carving through the turf of the hillside to a depth of approximately 30cm to reveal the underlying chalk common in this region. Measuring 55 meters in length and 50.5 meters wide, if measured from hand to hand, it is one of the largest and the most popular...