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Sixteen miles west of Blandford, just off the A352 (on the regular #216 bus route between Dorchester and Sherborne), the village of CERNE ABBAS has bags of charm in its own right, with gorgeous Tudor cottages and abbey ruins, but its main attraction is carved into the chalk hillside, visible from the main road just to the north. Here, the enormously priapic giant stands 180-feet high, and flourishes a club over a disproportionately small head. The age of the monument is disputed: some authorities believe it to be a pre-Roman fertility symbol (accounting for its most prominent feature), others that it might be a Romano-British figure of Hercules; the most interesting theory, however, given that there is no record of the Giant until the end of the seventeenth century, is that it was etched into the hillside around the time of the Civil War as a less-than-subtle piece of propaganda intended to mock Cromwell. Whatever its true origins, folklore has it that lying on the outsize member will induce conception, but the National Trust, who now own the site, do their best to stop people wandering over it and eroding the two-foot trenches that form the outlines.
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