Nice to see a cracking set of Pitt-Rivers!

...and of course we're looking forward to being joined again by local volunteer and chief mouser, Walter! 🏺 🐈‍⬛

I should learn to hide better 🙈😉

Congratulations!

As I was just telling Helen, I grew up in the shadow (metaphorically) of your fabulous monuments!

There are clear caveats basing an interpretation on a single illustration, but this horse just doesn’t strike me as something cut in the 17th century; one can point to the legs, tail and emphasis placed on his manhood. Indeed did it even start life as a horse? We probably will never know 🤷‍♂️ (4/4)

Mr Gee is said to have overlaid and replaced a smaller horse, and a single surviving illustration from 1772 shows it was very different. Conventional wisdom is that this horse dates from the late 1600s, but I’m just not sure... (3/4)

The current design is said to have been cut by a Mr Gee in 1778 and a depiction from 1885 shows that it was largely similar to today’s horse, with subtle differences. The steepness of the hill meant that the horse degraded quickly and had to undergo repeated repair. But it wasn’t the first… (2/4)

Unfortunately the area is largely covered by trees today, meaning that for the foreseeable future it will hard to have another look to see what, if anything, was really there. Only Lethbridge knew what he actually saw, and he died in 1971.
Perhaps that's what makes the site so intriguing! (5/5)

Furthermore, there are credible historical accounts of giant figures at Wandlebury, the earliest dating from 1605, and from this time on the spot was known locally as Gogmagog Hills, or variations thereof (4/5)

But he was an experienced, albeit slap-dash, excavator and Keeper of Anglo-Saxon Antiquities at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. So not the von Däniken type figure he is sometimes made out to be today (3/5)

Whilst I don't believe for a minute the full 'montage' he published, I can't help thinking that somewhere behind this is a kernel of reality. Lethbridge was certainly a very unorthodox character both professionally and personally; he was an advocate of dowsing and a believer in parapsychology (2/5)