Cerne Abbas Giant

Five or six years ago I was told by an elderly dame at Cerne Abbas (Dorset) that her mother had told her, in her young days, that it was customary, in her own youth, to " hold junkettings " on the Giant: and that it was well known that if a girl slept on the Giant, she would have a large family.

The " junkettings " were almost certainly the well-known May-pole festivities held in the Trundle, on the top of the hill, above the Giant. The latter part of the elderly dame's statement is not, I think, so well known. But it points to folk-memory of the fertility cult, with which the Giant seems so obviously to be connected.

K. T.