Skip to content
The Great Britain Guide

Weird & wonderful · South East England

Long Man of Wilmington

72-metre chalk hill figure on the South Downs, largest in Western Europe.

View towards Wilmington - geograph.org.uk - 2431679

Marathon — CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons licence

Plan your visit

Typical visit
1 h–2 h

About

The Long Man of Wilmington is the chalk hill figure on the steep north-facing slope of Windover Hill in the South Downs, near Eastbourne. At 72 m tall — the largest representation of the human form in Western Europe — he holds two staves and faces the visitor with deliberately distorted proportions to look correct from below. The figure's age is contested: 16th-century survey hints suggest he may be early modern rather than prehistoric, but his presence in the South Downs landscape is unmissable from the A27.

Photo gallery

From the Wikipedia article

The Long Man of Wilmington or Wilmington Giant is a hill figure on the steep slopes of Windover Hill near Wilmington, East Sussex, England. It is 6 miles (9.7 km) northwest of Eastbourne and 1⁄3 mile (540 m) south of Wilmington. Locally, the figure was once often called the Green Man. The Long Man is 235 feet (72 m) 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, a 2003 archaeological investigation showed that the figure may have been cut in the Early Modern era – the 16th or 17th century AD. From afar the figure appears to have been carved from the underlying chalk, but the modern figure is formed from white-painted breeze blocks and lime mortar. The Long Man is one of two major extant human hill figures in England; the other is the Cerne Abbas Giant, north of Dorchester. Both are scheduled 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 is the Litlington White Horse, three miles south-west of the Long Man.

Excerpt from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0. See the source article linked in Sources below.

Background

History

The origin of the Long Man is unclear. For many years the earliest known record was a drawing made by William Burrell when he visited Wilmington Priory, near Windover (or Wind-door) Hill, in 1766. Burrell's drawing shows a figure holding a rake and a scythe, both shorter than the present staves. In 1993, another drawing was discovered in the Devonshire Collections at Chatsworth House which had been made by the surveyor John Rowley in 1710, the earliest date the figure is known to have existed. 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. This was not widely believed by…

Sourced from Wikipedia under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Coordinates
50.8101, 0.1881
Address
Windover Hill, Wilmington, East Sussex, England
Established
1710

Sources

Featured in these 2 guides

Other places nearby

Loading nearby places…

Nearby

Other places from this era

Frequently asked questions

Where is Long Man of Wilmington?
Long Man of Wilmington is in South East England, in the United Kingdom — coordinates 50.8101°, 0.1881°.
When was Long Man of Wilmington built?
Long Man of Wilmington dates to 1710 — the Modern period.