Of the low range of hills south of Cambridge, the 16th century topographer William Camden wrote, ‘Neare unto Cambridge on the South-East side, there appeare aloft certaine high hilles, the Students call them Gogmagog-Hilles—‘. There has been much debate about how they got this name first recorded in Saxton’s Atlas of England and Wales in 1576.
What may have inspired the students to whom Camden attributes it is a tradition mentioned in the early modern Mandeville’s Travels (first English translation c. 1496). According to this, Alexander the Great imprisoned the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel, personified as the giants (in the bible, princes) Gog and Magog, in mountains near the Caspian Sea. He tried to contain them by building a great wall, but could not do this completely, so prayed for help to God, who, though Alexander was a pagan, closed the hills for him. The story probably reached Mandeville’s Travels by an Islamic source – the wall is the Sadd-e-Iskander, ‘Alexander’s Wall’, is Mazandaran, near the Iranian border with Turkmenistan. Probably built in the 6th century, its remains run from just short of the Caspian Sea eastward for more than 62 miles.
The Cambridge students, knowing Mandeville’s story, may have been making a mildly academic joke here, alluding to their own bottling up in Cambridge – the Gogmagogs are four miles out of Cambridge, that is, outside the university statutory three-mile bounds.
They also undoubtedly also knew of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain (c. 1136), in which he tells how a giant he calls Goemagot was overthrown by Corineus. Later, this name was rendered GOGMAGOG, and later still re-divided into two, whence the effigies in the Guildhall, London, earlier called Gogmagog were rechristened Gog and Magog. This is probably also the reason why the Ordnance Survey took to printing the name of the Cambridgeshire hills on the map as “Gog Magog Hills’, although Camden’s one word spelling has long been standard.
By Camden’s time, the name ‘Gogmagog’ seems to have become almost a generic one for turf-cut giants, as at Plymouth Hoe, Devon. Such a giant existed at Cambridge too, its first known mention in Mundus alter et idem (1605), written by Joseph Hall, a Cambridge graduate. Some decades later, in 1640 John Layer describes it as ‘a high and mighty figure of a giant which the scholars of Cambridge cut upon the turf’. It was still there when the Cambridgeshire antiquary William Cole was a boy. He writes:
When I was a boy about 1724 I remember my father or mother, as it happened that I went with one or the other of them to Cambridge, the Road from Baberham there lying through the Camp…always used to stop to show me the figure of the Guant carved in the turf: a concerning whom there were many traditions now worm away.
The age of this giant, now vanished, has been disputed. Gervase of Tilbury, telling a story attached to Wandlebury Camp on the Gogmagogs, does not mention one, and nor does Sir John Eliot in his Ortho-epia Gallica (1593), although he says that the hills were made by ‘Atlas…cousin german to Gogmagog’. Camden does not mention such a figure either, and it is inconceivable that he should not have been shown it while he was there.
The archaeologist T.C. Lethbridge, however, claimed to have discovered during excavations in 1955-6 the outlines of three giant figures here, including a round-eyed goddess on the back of a beaked horse drawing a chariot. He identified her as Magog, a goddess of the moon, and believed the figures were the focus of “ancient fertility rites” which he connected with the public sports or pastimes held in the Gogmagogs, certainly by 1574, when the university authorities banned scholars from attending.
There appears to be no evidence at all to support the idea that these pastimes were a survival of ancient practice, and the committee appointed by the Council for British Archaeology in 1957 to monitor Lethbridge’s work was critical of his methods, which involved probing with a steel bar, and plotting on paper the results of some 30,000-50,000 soundings. The committee observed that the area tested was so densely matted with tree roots that nothing identifiable as figures could have emerged. Soil analysis also revealed that the chalk uncovered by Lethbridge had never previously been exposed, and a further survey in the late 1970s failed to find any supporting evidence to support his claims.
Nevertheless, T. C. Lethbridge’s conviction that he had found ‘buried gods’ won much popular support, although scholars still favor that the giant seen by William Cole was cut by Cambridge students some time after Camden’s visit, probably between 1593 and 1605 and that, like other turf-cut giants of the same period, he was called ‘the gogmagog.’