Giant's Grave, Giant's Chair, Giant's Causeway, Giant Hill: Britain and Ireland are full of giants' belongings. Did people explain big things with big people? I gathered 331 giant-named places and 33 giant legends, and measured each against ordinary places and monuments of the same kind nearby.
Giants have left their furniture all over these islands. There is a Giant's Chair on the Isles of Scilly and another in Argyll, a Giant's Leg in Shetland and a Giant's Thumb on the coast of Conwy. In Ireland the Ordnance Survey's surveyors wrote "Giants Grave" beside hundreds of stone tombs. On the chalk of Dorset a giant with a club has stood on the hillside since, on recent dating, the tenth century. Old stories add their own: Wade and his wife Bell throwing a hammer across the North York Moors, Cormoran carrying granite to build St Michael's Mount, Fionn mac Cumhaill laying a causeway to Scotland.
An old idea runs through all of this: when people met something too big to explain, a great stone, a strange hill or a gorge, they said a giant made it. The Old English poem The Seafarer speaks of high stone walls as the work of giants. So I asked the map a simple question: did people explain big things with big people? If they did, the places named for giants should be bigger, higher or more striking than ordinary places of the same kind.
I put three kinds of evidence together. Names: every place in OS Open Names for Great Britain with Giant, the Gaelic famhair or the Welsh cawr in its name (42), and named giant features from OpenStreetMap in Ireland. Monuments: every barrow, megalith and hillfort in the open datasets whose name contains a giant, and all 1,849 megalithic tombs in the Irish Sites and Monuments Record with a usable location, with the name the old Ordnance Survey maps gave them. Legends: 33 named giants whose stories a written source ties to a place.
The short answer: giants own graves, not mountains. 86% of the English giant names I found call the place a grave or a bed, and in Ireland 82% of giant places are megalithic tombs. But the giant's tomb is not the big one. Irish Giant's Graves are no larger in the landscape than other tombs nearby, and the great passage tombs, the biggest of all, are almost never giants' graves. Giant hills are not unusually tall either. What giant names do is stick to the ancient: in Britain they lie far closer to prehistoric monuments than ordinary names do.
Rust marks are Irish tombs that the Ordnance Survey maps call a Giant's Grave or Bed; gold are tombs called Dermot and Grania's Bed, after the lovers who fled across Ireland; violet are Druid's Altars. Green marks are other giant places: names on the OS map of Britain, giant barrows, stones and hillforts, and giant features in Ireland. Large rings are the giants of legend, and white chalk marks the giant hill figures. Tap anything for its source.
The two islands look very different. Of the 331 giant places, 264 are in the Republic of Ireland and 64 in Great Britain. That is a difference of sources as much as of giants: the Irish monuments record kept the names written on the nineteenth and early twentieth century Ordnance Survey maps, while the modern open gazetteer of Britain keeps few names of antiquities. Northern Ireland, home of the most famous giant place of all, has no open monument record in this study, so it appears only through the Giant's Causeway and one tomb from OpenStreetMap.
Sorting every giant place by what it actually is gives a clear picture. In Ireland, 94% of giant places are ancient monuments, and 82% are megalithic tombs. In Great Britain the mix is wider: 41% are monuments (barrows, cairns, hillforts and standing stones), and the rest are hills, coastal rocks, woods and water, many of them Gaelic names in the Highlands such as Cnoc an Fhamhair, "the giant's hill".
The names say the same. Of 304 giant names in English, 261 call the place a grave or a bed. Then come stones, rocks and quoits (15), hills (8), chairs and seats (5) and a few body parts: a leg, a thumb, a rib. Giants, in the names people gave, are mostly dead and buried.
Ireland gives the best test, because every megalithic tomb in the national record carries the label that the Ordnance Survey's six-inch maps gave it. Of the 1,849 tombs with a usable location, 847 have a name or description on the maps. 212 of those are Giant's Graves or Beds, 25% of all named tombs. 120 are Dermot and Grania's Beds, seen in folklore as the places where the lovers of The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne camped for the night as they fled, and 38 are Druid's Altars. The rest are plain descriptions such as Cromlech, Dolmen or Carn (398) or other local names (79).
The giant has favourite kinds of tomb. 18% of court tombs are called Giant's Graves, and so are 11% of wedge tombs. But only 4% of passage tombs are, although passage tombs include the most famous prehistoric monuments in Ireland: Newgrange, Knowth and the cairns of Carrowkeel and Loughcrew. On the maps, Carrowkeel and Loughcrew are plain Carn, Knowth is a Moat and Newgrange a Tumulus; 38 of the 113 named passage tombs are simply Carn or Carns. If giants were the explanation for anything big, the passage tombs should have been theirs.
The giants are northern. 84% of Giant's Graves lie north of latitude 53.5, against 59% of all tombs. Sligo has 68, Donegal 42, Cavan 24, Leitrim 17 and Monaghan 16. In Cavan, 36% of all tombs are giants' graves. Dermot and Grania have Donegal (49) and Clare (33). Clare has many tombs but only 13 giants. The name a tomb got seems to depend on where it was, more than on what it was.
When did the giant arrive? The record keeps the label from the first edition of the six-inch map (about 1840) for 83 of the Giant's Graves. 30 already carried the giant name then. 50 were not shown on the first edition at all, so their giant name enters the maps with a later edition. Where the record dates the latest edition, it is between 1900 and 1953 for 56 of 57 Giant's Graves. 21 later maps mark only the "site of" a Giant's Grave: the name outlived the tomb.
None of the open records gives the size of a tomb, so I measured what the terrain can show: how far each tomb stands above the ground 1 km around it, what share of that ground lies lower, and how high it is above the sea. A "big" tomb in the sense that matters here, one that catches the eye, should sit higher than its surroundings. I compared each Giant's Grave with fifty tombs of the same kind from the same 50 km square, and separately with fifty tombs that the maps name in some other way.
The Giant's Graves are, if anything, the less striking tombs. 13% of them sit on a local high point, against 25% of other named tombs of the same kind nearby (chance below 0.001) and 18% of all tombs (chance 0.051). The median Giant's Grave stands 0.1 m above the ground 1 km around it; other named tombs, 3.9 m. Height above sea level shows no difference (101 m against 93 m). Dermot and Grania's Beds are lower still: a median of 67 m above the sea against 90 m for matched tombs (chance 0.001).
The name went to the tombs people lived beside, not to the ones that loomed over them.
The British monuments are too few for a strong test, but they point the same way. The fifteen barrows and cairns called a giant's grave are no higher above their surroundings than other barrows nearby (median -0.9 m against 9.8 m, chance 0.205). The Atlas of Hillforts does record a size, the area enclosed. Its eleven giant hillforts, from Giant's Grave in Wiltshire to Castell Cawr in Conwy, enclose a median of 1.16 hectares, against 0.95 for matched hillforts (chance 0.752): a little bigger, but well within what chance gives with so few.
If giant names are not about size, what are they about? In Britain, they are about age. I compared each of the 42 giant names in OS Open Names with fifty ordinary names of the same kind (hills with hills, woods with woods) from the same 50 km square, and with fifty random points of land.
36% of giant names lie within 1 km of a prehistoric monument, against 18% of matched names and 15% of random land (chance 0.001 against matched names). The median giant name is 1.5 km from one; matched names, 2.7 km. Hillforts make the biggest difference: 36% of giant names are within 2 km of one, against 20%. Some of this is direct: Giants Grave in Wiltshire is the name of the hill that carries the hillfort of that name, and Giant's Bank Wood in Powys sits beside Giant's Bank. That is the point. A giant name often marks an ancient earthwork or stone.
The hills, though, are not giant. The thirteen giant hills (Giant Hill, Giant's Hill, Cnoc an Fhamhair and the rest) stand a median 5.3 m above the ground 1 km around, against 22.7 m for matched hills from the same squares (chance 0.080). The Cerne Abbas Giant is cut into the side of a hill known as Giant Hill, a reminder that a hill can carry a giant's name for what is on it rather than for its size.
The legends are where the "big things" idea is strongest. I collected 33 stories that a written source ties to a place, from Wikipedia articles on the giants, the hill figures and Welsh folklore, and from an English Heritage article on giants. Of these, seven explain a natural landform: the Avon Gorge, dug by the giant brothers Vincent and Goram; Steep Holm and Flat Holm, the drowned Goram's head and shoulder; St Michael's Mount, built by Cormoran with granite carried from the moors; the Giant's Causeway. Five explain a prehistoric monument (Stonehenge, Stanton Drew, the hillforts of Clifton Down, Maes Knoll and Trencrom), seven a Roman or medieval work such as Wade's Causeway or Pickering Castle, and six are the giant hill figures themselves. In the other eight, the source says only where the giant lived.
The legend places do sit high. 41% are on a local high point, against 11% of random land in the same squares (chance below 0.001). But that is partly how the stories are told: a giant on Penhill, on Trencrom Hill or on Firle Beacon is placed on a hill by the story itself. The stories reach for the gorge, the island and the hilltop; the names on the ground went mostly to graves.
Britain's hill figures are mostly horses: Wikipedia counts 16 known white horses in the UK. Only two giants survive, the Cerne Abbas Giant and the Long Man of Wilmington, but the record shows six giant figures in all. The Giant Ghyst at Clifton, Gogmagog on Plymouth Hoe and Gogmagog at Wandlebury were all lost, and the Giant of Hindover Hill faded away by 1924.
I searched all 267,744 features in OS Open Names for the English word Giant (Giant, Giants, Giant's, Giants'), the Scottish Gaelic famhair in its forms (Famhair, Fhamhair, Fhamair, Famhairean) and the Welsh cawr and its mutated form gawr as words of their own, plus the Gog Magog names of Cambridgeshire. That gives 42 names: 21 English, 15 Gaelic, 3 Welsh and 3 Gog Magog. Wade and Bran are left out, because Wade is a common surname (General Wade's Military Road) and Bran a common word. In OpenStreetMap for the Republic of Ireland I kept names with Giant and set aside 71 that use the word as a brand or adjective (EuroGiant shops, giant trees, a sculpture trail, The Giant's Garden in Dublin). Matching a word says nothing about when or why a place was named; I make no claims about origins.
Irish tombs come from the Sites and Monuments Record of the National Monuments Service (151,308 records; 10,879 have a placeholder position far out in the Atlantic and are left out, including 213 tombs). The names are those in the record's first-edition and latest-edition map fields, sorted by simple rules: Giant first, then Dermot or Grania, then Druid, then other personal or local names, then descriptions. British barrows and cairns (12,831 in Britain, Ireland and Man), megaliths (2,209) and hillforts (4,147) come from the datasets built for Is the Barrow a European Thing?, The Megalith Highway and Within Sight. Records from different sources within 400 m with the same kind of name are counted once.
Terrain comes from AWS Terrain Tiles at zoom 10 (cells of about 95 m). For each place I took its height, the mean height of 16 points on rings of 500 m and 1 km, and the share of 64 points within 1 km that lie lower; points over the sea are left out. These measure prominence in the landscape, not the size of a monument, which no open record gives. A tomb on a small knoll can be prominent at a scale finer than these cells.
Each giant tomb is compared with 50 tombs of the same class from the same 50 km square without a giant name; when fewer than 20 were available, the same class within 100 km, then any class within 50 km or 100 km. For names, the controls are 50 ordinary OS names of the same local type from the same 50 km square, and 50 random land points. Each test compares the real places with 2,000 replicate sets that take one control at random per place; chance values are two-sided. Distances to monuments use the barrows, megaliths, stone circles and hillforts listed above, in Great Britain only.
The Irish names are the Ordnance Survey's, written down by surveyors who asked local people, copied and sometimes standardised them; "Giants Grave" may also have become a habit of particular surveyors or districts. The British gazetteer keeps few antiquity names, so the British sample is small (42 names) and the British monument names depend on what OpenStreetMap and Wikidata editors recorded. The legends come from a handful of written sources and favour England and Wales. I ran many measures, so single chance values near 0.05 should be read with caution. The results I would put weight on are the lack of prominence of the Irish Giant's Graves, the rarity of giant names on passage tombs, and the closeness of British giant names to prehistoric monuments.