Chris Amies art

Acrylic, 23 x 30 cm. From a photo of Raleighs Cottage, Long Street, Cerne Abbas, Dorset.

I did an earlier version of the picture but it didn’t come out well. Then I tried again at art club and got so annoyed with it that I just sloshed on the colour and it came out like this.

Cerne Abbas is best known for the Giant, a huge chalk figure carved into the hillside nearby. The Giant is 55 metres long and wields a club above his head. Recent research by the National Trust and the University of Gloucestershire suggests the Giant was carved in the late Saxon period, around the 10th century CE. It isn’t mentioned in writings until the late 17th century, but may have been overgrown through the centuries and then cleared and restored; any earlier local reference to it may have been lost when Cerne Abbey was dissolved, in 1539.

The village is 13km north of Dorchester. It has under 1,000 inhabitants, down from 1,500 in the 18th century when it was a thriving market town with silk, brewing and leather works. But it never got the railway and in the 19th century its fortunes declined.

Raleighs Cottage was built in 1580 and it is said that Sir Walter Raleigh (1553-1618), soldier, statesman and favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, once stayed there.

Cerne Abbas giant photo: By PeteHarlow CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=70903693

Boyhood of Raleigh by John Everett Millais: Art UK, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91860385