Cheese company ‘castrates’ the Cerne Abbas giant
Vic Irvine, the head brewer at the Cerne Abbas Brewery in Dorset whose branding sports a fully intact giant, said it was “abhorrent to castrate him”.
“We love our giant here and defacing him like this is like throwing paint over Nelson’s Column.
“It is clearly a binary giant who has a large phallus. It’s that simple.
“If you don’t like it, don’t use our giant. The whole thing makes me really cross, I’m incandescent with rage.”
A statement on the brewery’s Facebook page added: “How dare you use our giant on your marketing and then remove his genitalia so to not offend the wokefolk.”
Baron Robert Pouget De St Victor founded the Oxford Cheese Company – noted for its Oxford Blue – in 1986, and the cheddar named for the historic hill drawing is a more recent creation.
The giant chalk figure outside the village of Cerne Abbas is believed to have been created between 700 and 1100 AD, with various alterations made over the centuries. It stands at 180ft tall and sports a 36ft phallus.
The decision of an Oxfordshire-based company not to include this anatomic detail on packaging for its Cerne Abbas Cheddar has caused concern among local Dorset politicians in a burgeoning inter-county row.
‘It makes a mockery of it’
Alistair Chisholm, the mayor of nearby Dorchester, said: “That’s just wrong. The whole point is that he is depicted the way he is, which is what makes people come to see him.
“It makes a mockery of it. It’s like filling in Durdle Door and making it a solid block of rock.
“His member is what makes him magnificent. It would just be plain wrong to make him amorphous.
“The whole point is that it provokes a reaction. Remove his member and he is just a white line on the hillside.”
Jill Hayes, a Dorchester councillor, added: “The fact that they have chopped his bits off is very strange.”
“It’s even stranger that they would use our iconic landmark instead of one of their own.”
Paul Watson, the…
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