The best known of Turf-Monuments other than horses is the Giant, on Trendle Hill, near Cerne Abbas, in Dorsetshire. This the same author (d) describes as follows:
This is a figure roughly representing a man, undraped, and with a club in his right hand; the height is 180 feet, and the outlines are marked out by a trench 2 feet wide and of about the same depth. It covers nearly an acre of ground. Hutchin imagines this figure to represent the Saxon god, Heil, and places its date as anterior to A. D. 600. * * * Britton, on the other hand, tells us that “vulgar tradition makes this figure commemorate the destruction of a giant who, having feasted on some sheep in Blackmoor and laid himself to sleep on this hill, was pinioned down like another Gulliver and killed by the enraged peasants, who immediately traced his dimensions for the information of posterity.” There were formerly discernible some markings between the legs of the figure rather above the level of the ankles, which the country folk took for the numerals 748, and imagined to indicate the date. We need, perhaps, scarcely remark that Arabic numerals were unknown in Europe until at least six centuries later than this period.
SWEDEN.
Mr. Paul B. Du Chaillu (a) gives the following (condensed) account describing, among many more “rock tracings,” as he calls them, those reproduced as Figs. 137 and 138:
There are found in Sweden large pictures engraved on the rocks which are of great antiquity, long before the Roman period.
These are of different kinds and sizes, the most numerous being the drawings of ships or boats, canoe-shaped and alike at both ends (with figures of men and animals), and of fleets fighting against each other or making an attack upon the shore. The hero of the fight, or the champion, is generally depicted as much larger than the other combatants, who probably were of one people, though of different tribes, for their arms are similar and all seem without clothing, though in some cases they are represented as wearing a helmet or shield.
On some rocks are representations of cattle, horses, reindeer, turtles, ostriches, and camels, the latter showing that in earlier times these people were acquainted with more southern climes. The greatest number and the largest and most complicated in detail of the tracings occur, especially in the present Sweden, in Bohuslän, “the ancient Viken of the Sagas,” on the coast of the peninsula washed by the Cattegat. They are also found in Norway, especially in Smaalenene, a province contiguous to that of Bohuslän, but become more scarce in the north, though found on the Trondhjem fjord.
Fig. 137.—Petroglyph in Bohuslän, Sweden.