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Giants of the British Isles: From Gogmagog to the Long Man of Wilmington
- Untruth Seekers
- Jul 20
- 6 min read
Before the Romans arrived, before the Saxons, before anyone whose name we know with certainty, Britain was inhabited by giants.
This, at least, is what Geoffrey of Monmouth recorded in the twelfth century, and what subsequent generations of chroniclers, poets, and storytellers repeated, embroidered, and occasionally contradicted. The original inhabitants of the island that would become Britain were a race of giants, and the first act of the legendary Trojan founder Brutus upon landing was to clear them out. The last of them – Gogmagog, greatest of the giants of Albion – was defeated by Brutus’s companion Corineus in a wrestling match and thrown from a cliff into the sea.
This is, in several respects, a founding myth about displacement. Giants, in the British tradition, are almost always what came before: the original occupants of the land, too large and too old and too rooted to fit into the world that follows them. They are not villains, exactly. They are simply prior.
Gogmagog and the giants of Albion
Gogmagog – or Goemagot, depending on the source – gives his name to the Gogmagog Hills in Cambridgeshire, and his image, alongside that of Gog, has been carried in the Lord Mayor’s Show in London since at least the fifteenth century. The paired Gog and Magog figures that now stand in the Guildhall are the most recent in a long line of replacements – the originals were made of wickerwork, their descendants of various materials, all of them embodying the idea that the city of London was founded on the site of a giant’s defeat.
There are also chalk giants. The Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorset – a large and emphatic figure cut into the hillside – is the most famous, though his precise age and origin remain genuinely contested. He may be prehistoric. He may be seventeenth century. The chalk, which requires periodic re-cutting to remain visible, keeps its secrets.
Cornwall: Jack and the giants of the far west
Cornwall is Britain’s most dedicated giant country. The tradition of Jack the Giant Killer is specifically Cornish in origin, and the giants Jack dispatches are figures of genuine menace – named, located in specific Cornish landscapes, and with enough detail to suggest that someone, at some point, knew exactly which hill they were talking about.
Bolster the Giant presents a different kind of story. He fell in love with Saint Agnes and pursued her with a devotion she did not reciprocate. She set him an impossible task – to fill a hole in the clifftop with his own blood, assuring him it would not take long. It was, in fact, a hole that drained directly into the sea. Bolster bled until he died. The cliffs at Chapel Porth are said to be stained red with the residue, which is either poetic or geological depending on your temperament.
Wales: giants of the Mabinogion
The Welsh giant tradition is embedded in the Mabinogion and the wider Arthurian cycle. Bendigeidfran – Bran the Blessed – is a king of Britain so large that no house or ship could contain him; he wades the Irish Sea rather than sailing it. Rhitta Gawr collected the beards of defeated kings as trophies, which is a specific kind of ambition, until he was himself defeated by Arthur. Giants in Welsh tradition are rarely simply enormous men. They are figures of cosmic scale, their actions reshaping landscapes and the fates of kingdoms.
Ireland and Scotland: Fionn Mac Cumhaill and the Giant’s Causeway
Ireland’s Fionn Mac Cumhaill – Finn McCool in the anglicised form – is the most geographically productive giant in the British Isles. The Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim, with its extraordinary hexagonal basalt columns, is explained by his construction of a land bridge to Scotland to fight a rival giant, Benandonner. The Scottish version of the same story has Fionn building the causeway from his side; both traditions agree on the geology, if not the direction.
The Irish Fomorians predate Fionn by several mythological ages: primordial beings, often monstrous, associated with darkness, chaos, and the sea. They are Britain and Ireland’s oldest giants – not folk figures or romance heroes but something closer to the forces of nature given enormous, ungovernable form.
Sussex: the Long Man and Sir Bevis of Hampton
Sussex has two very different contributions to the giant tradition, one carved into its hills and one embedded in its medieval romance literature.
The Long Man of Wilmington
Cut into the chalk of the South Downs near Wilmington in East Sussex, the Long Man is one of the largest representations of a human figure in the world: 235 feet from head to foot, holding a staff in each hand, and gazing out from the hillside with an equanimity that has endured whatever age it was created in. That age is genuinely unknown. Theories place its origin variously in the prehistoric period, the Romano-British era, the Saxon period, and as late as the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries. The chalk, as with the Cerne Abbas Giant, maintains a dignified silence on the subject.
The Long Man has been interpreted as a pilgrim, a warrior, a deity, a surveyor, and a representation of Baldur, Beowulf, or various other named figures from different traditions. None of these interpretations has been conclusively established. What can be said is that someone, at some point, thought it worth the considerable effort of cutting this figure into the hillside and that subsequent generations thought it worth the equal effort of maintaining it. The Long Man is there because people kept deciding he should be.
Sir Bevis of Hampton and the sword Morglay
Sir Bevis is a different kind of Sussex giant story – one in which the giant is not the hero but the companion. The medieval romance of Bevis of Hampton, one of the most popular in Middle English literature, follows the adventures of a knight from the Southampton area through battles, betrayals, and encounters with the supernatural. His sword, Morglay, is among the romance’s most enduring details: named, described with care, the kind of weapon that acquires its own reputation in a story.
The Sussex and Hampshire connection runs deep. Bevis’s horse – perhaps the most celebrated horse in English romance after the Arthurian tradition – is named Arundel, after the West Sussex town. Arundel itself has long associations with the Bevis legend; there is a tower at Arundel Castle known as Bevis’s Tower.
In Southampton, a giant figure of Sir Bevis has stood at the Bargate for centuries, alongside his giant companion Ascapart – a giant whom Bevis defeated and who subsequently became his page, an arrangement that says something about the particular logic of medieval romance.
Ascapart is, by the standards of British giant folklore, an unusually sympathetic figure. Defeated but not destroyed, enormous but domesticated, he occupies an odd position in the tradition: the giant who chose a different kind of ending. He is commemorated alongside Bevis at the Bargate in Southampton, which is a more dignified fate than most giants in British literature manage.
What the giants tell us
Across the British Isles, the giant tradition does something consistent and quietly interesting: it accounts for the landscape. The Giant’s Causeway is where Fionn built his bridge. The red cliffs at Chapel Porth are Bolster’s blood. The Gogmagog Hills preserve a name. The Long Man stands on the South Downs. Giants, in British folklore, are the explanation for things that are too large or too old or too strange to have been made by ordinary people.
They are also, almost universally, the past. The age of giants is always an earlier age – one that explains the present without belonging to it. They built things we cannot replicate. They were defeated by people smaller and cleverer than themselves. They left their marks on hills and coastlines and the names of places. And then they were gone, mostly, leaving behind only the landscape and the stories told to explain it.
The Long Man of Wilmington keeps his own counsel on all of this. He has been doing so for a very long time.
Sussex Roots
Sir Bevis of Hampton – his sword Morglay, his horse Arundel, and the giant Ascapart who followed in his wake – features in Sussex Roots, alongside the wider landscape of Sussex folklore from which the legend grew.
The county that produced the Long Man of Wilmington and lent its town’s name to a medieval romance’s most celebrated horse has always had a particular relationship with the large and the old and the unexplained.
About the Untruth Seekers
The Untruth Seekers are dedicated investigators of the legends, ghost stories, and historical mysteries lurking beneath the surface of Sussex and beyond. Their confidential files document the folklore, hauntings, and half-buried histories that most people walk past without a second glance.
All findings are published under the series From the Confidential Files of the Untruth Seekers, for readers who suspect there is always more to the story.
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