Imogen Lycett Green on ancient Sussex: the Long Man of Wilmington.

Two crows tear apart a rabbit at the Long Man’s feet. Perhaps they are preparing an offering. Standing tall with his staves, the Long Man of Wilmington has drawn me to him along a chalk bridleway. It has not rained in weeks and the chalk is packed hard, so I am barefoot. The hill is scattered with doughty cowslips and the May blossom hangs on to the hawthorn as a strange, chaotic wind blows about, tossing goldfinches this way and that. Yes, goldfinches! Up here, by the hill. The wind buffers me from the distant cars on the A27, and above the wheat field, skylarks sing.

Gazing up at the Long Man, 40 times as high as me, I can see that the modern figure is made from breeze blocks and lime mortar. No matter – the effect is the same as if it were carved in the chalk, as he once was. The Long Man looks like his own man, but in fact he belongs to the Sussex Archaeological Society, gifted to them in 1925 by the landowning Duke of Devonshire, whose family still owns much of Eastbourne. I’ve done my research. In a hundred and one different references in books and online, the Long Man’s provenance is discussed. Some believe he is a Neolithic monument, from c3000 BC, while others think he was carved in chalk in the Iron Age (c600BC). In 2003, a new archaeological investigation claimed the Long Man was created in the Early Modern era, possibly in the 16th or 17th century. As the earliest reference to him is a drawing made by the Duke of Devonshire’s surveyor John Rowley, in 1710, any of the theories may be true.

Archaeology is often all chat and no trousers – nobody really knows – so you can believe the theory you like best. And sometimes, archaeological theories are reinforced by finds from other sites of a similar era. The shape of the Long Man is similar to the design on an Anglo-Saxon buckle discovered by the archaeologist Sonia Chadwick Hawkes in Kent in 1964, so she dated him to around the 7th or 8th century AD. There is chalk figurine of a voluptuous female with accentuated hips and thighs, found in 1939 at Grimes Graves Neolithic flint mine, in Norfolk, which has been dated to 2650 BC. Found on an altar with a phallus and seven antler picks, the Grimes Graves Venus gave weight to the idea of a fertility cult among Neolithic farmers. And storymaking around this idea has led others – including former Chief Druid Philip Carr-Gomm – to suggest the mound in front of the Long Man of Wilmington is a pubis and that the original Neolithic monument was intended to portray a woman.

It is true that the South Downs suggest, over and over with their clefts and folds, a female body. In fertility cults the world over, offerings are made to effigies of goddesses to bring on a good harvest. The Romans had their Demeter, the Greeks Ceres, from whose name we get ‘cereal’. If the chalk giant on the hill was a fertility symbol, then perhaps worshipping her might bring about a good harvest. There is a development to this theory, that the Long Man, and other chalk figures, like the Uffington White Horse, also carved on a north slope, acted as harvest clocks. The sun in winter does not reach to the north side. When the sun is finally high enough to come over the hill in April and hit the Long Man, it is a signal to sow seeds. When the sun leaves again, in the autumn, so it is time to make ready for winter.

I like this theory best. We tend to think that because we make art for art’s sake, so our ancestors might have done so too, but in a world without written language, books and clocks, isn’t it likely that the chalk figure was a form of communication? It happened later, when Christianity took hold in these parts, around the 9th century AD, that a church steeple with a bell might ring out and call parishioners from rural homesteads to join together in worship. A steeple was built high to be seen from miles around. Let’s say Neolithic farmers worshipped goddesses of fertility and lived by the sun and the moon, then is it too much of a stretch to imagine a harvest clock?

To the right of the Long Man (stage right) many curious travellers have worn footsteps into the hillside. You can fit your foot in the comfortable footholds and climb to the top, step by step. Then you sit above his head and look north, over Arlington reservoir, over the Weald to the Surrey Downs. On a clear, blue-sky day, like today, you can see for miles and miles. The Long Man would have called to many people: I can see you so you can see me. And chalk is especially luminous on a moonlit night.

But it is daytime, and what am I doing there? I have no need of a harvest clock. The buzzard calls in the copse to my right. I decide I need the Long Man of Wilmington and all the theories swirling around him – including a rumour that the Grimes Graves Venus was a hoax – to remind me of how little we know. Or need to know. We may have invented atom bombs and artificial intelligence but what do we really require beyond sex and food? Which is all our ancestors needed. I’d say stories, we need stories, for I’d be sorry not to have experienced the joys and sorrows of all the books I have read and voices I have grown to love. But beyond stories and sex and food? Music? But here we have lark song. Um, cars? Kagoules? Washing machines? Is travel important? Are guns? Is ‘efficiency’?

When you’re up on the hill with the Long Man, the washing machine stops whirring and you remember a time without clocks. His mystery is what gives him his power. The human quest for knowledge has led humanity into some dark holes. Sometimes I think the Long Man is guarding the heart of the earth, where he or she came from. Where we came from. He is walking back into the hill. You had everything, he says, and you destroyed it, so I’m turning my back on you. The quest for knowledge will never deliver as many gifts as our imagination can. The Long Man of Wilmington reminds us to keep dreaming. I’m sad to leave him. But my stomach is rumbling. The crows have finished their rabbit and left the skeleton. My hunger is a clock and I’ll follow it all the way home.