Mount Caburn, the steep Iron-Age hillfort that rises above the village of Glynde near Lewes, is remembered in Sussex folklore as the seat of a giant named Gill. Like the giants said to have once walked the whole chalk range of the South Downs, he was a hill-dweller of enormous strength, and the tale most often told of him is that he passed the time by flinging his huge hammer from the top of the Caburn far out over the surrounding country.
The story
The motif of the hammer-throwing giant — measuring his might by the distance of the cast, and leaving the landing-place marked in the landscape — is common across the chalk hills of southern England, where prominent earthworks and barrows were readily explained as the work or the playthings of giants. Gill of the Caburn belongs to that older imaginative geography, in which the great green ramparts above Lewes were not the labour of Iron-Age people but the home of a being vast enough to throw his hammer across the Downs.