Land Acquisition Protects The Cerne Abbas Giant

In southern England, near the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, a 180-foot-tall giant with a 35-foot-long erect phallus has adorned a green hillside for a thousand years.

Credit: National Trust

Constructed by carving trenches into the hill and then packing them with chalk, the Cerne Abbas Giant wields a club in one hand and bears expressive features on his face. Despite the giant’s somewhat intimidating appearance, a recent fundraising campaign to buy the land surrounding the figure is proof that he is quite popular around the world. The acquisition of the 341 acres known as the Giant’s Lair will improve access to the landmark, secure archaeological research sites and provide opportunities for native species conservation.

The National Trust, a British conservation organization, has owned and managed the small plot of land on which the giant rests since 1920. In 2025, the land surrounding the giant went on sale, to the chagrin of locals and conservationists. After raising more than $2.7 million with grants and bequests, the National Trust announced a fundraiser for the final $450,000. In just two months, the organization met its goal with gifts from 20 countries, including Australia, Japan, Ireland and Iceland.

Like many folk icons, the Cerne Abbas Giant’s story is murky. The first known written reference to the figure is a 1694 account from a churchwarden, written in terms that suggested the region was long familiar with the giant. For many years, archaeologists speculated that the giant was prehistoric, but that theory was dashed by a 2020 analysis that found snail shells from species that didn’t arrive in England until the medieval era. A year later, testing of sand samples from the base of the pictograph’s trenches narrowed the giant’s creation to between 700 and 1100 C.E.

For the National Trust, this land acquisition was as much about preserving the giant’s surrounding landscape as it was about protecting the giant. As Hannah Jefferson, the National Trust’s general manager of the Dorset region, says in a statement, “We can now set about creating a patchwork or mosaic of habitats to help species adapt and thrive.”

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