The Cerne Giant Festival – building community through a sense of place
The Cerne Giant Festival began in 2017 and takes place every year in the Cerne Valley in Dorset. This is a very rural area, in which the largest village, Cerne Abbas, has a population of only 8oo. Over the last century it has become a popular village for incomers, but this has inevitably diluted the indigenous community. The Cerne Abbas Giant is a sort of genius loci whose very presence commands a response. We now know he has been here for a 1000 or more years, and during that time he has symbolised many things to many people.
The Festival is a series of stand-alone events which occur mid April to mid-May. Its strapline is ‘Celebrating Humanity in the Landscape’: the pun is intentional! Almost all of the events are home-grown, drawing on the talents and experience of local people. Broadly speaking, they explore the history, farming and landscape management, natural history, and cultural history of Dorset and the Valley in particular. The annual Beltane celebrations hosted by the Wessex Morris Men and Cerne Abbas Brewery on Giant Hill are the pivot upon which everything hinges. A widely distributed printed programme and website encourages people to explore their own relationship with the Land in its broadest sense, and experience shows that once someone is ‘hooked’ by an event that catches their eye they become more adventurous in sampling other events to further deepen their knowledge of and empathy for the historical, managed, and natural landscape.
Cerne Giant Festival 