Warrior of the Gog Magog Hills

Wandlebury Ring, an Iron Age hillfort atop the Gog Magog Hills just south of Cambridge, takes its name from one of Britain's oldest giant-legends. The biblical Gog and Magog were reimagined in British folklore as Gogmagog, the last and greatest of the giants said to have inhabited the island before the Trojan hero Brutus arrived — the same figure whose defeat by Corineus is remembered in Cornwall. A 1574 decree of Cambridge University, forbidding students to visit the hills on pain of a fine, is the earliest record of the 'Gog Magog' name being attached to this stretch of chalk downland, and antiquarians of the 17th and 18th centuries described a huge hill figure of the giant cut into the turf at Wandlebury — though all trace of it had vanished by the 19th century.

The giant lingered on in the folklore of nearby villages long after his image faded from the hillside. Children in Cherry Hinton were warned to keep out of the local chalk pits, lest the buried giants Gog and Magog wake and give chase. Another tale told that Gog once quarrelled with his wife Magog and hurled a great clod of earth at her; it missed, and where it landed a new hill rose from the ground.

In 1955–56, the dowser and archaeologist T.C. Lethbridge reignited the legend when he claimed to have uncovered, beneath the turf of Wandlebury, the outlines of three enormous figures cut into the chalk: a sun-god, a moon-goddess, and a warrior-god riding a horse-drawn chariot. Mainstream archaeologists rejected the find as natural ice-age scarring, but Lethbridge's 'warrior-god' chimed with an older local belief that the ramparts themselves were haunted — walkers reporting a mounted figure who challenges travellers at dusk, or simply an oppressive sense of being watched from the ancient earthworks, as if Gogmagog's last guardian still kept watch over his hill.