Where did Britain’s legendary chalk figures come from?

Dabbling in cod archaeology and potted mythologies

Back in late 2019, I was working as the most junior member of British GQ’s features team. Every week we would be sent dozens of unsolicited books by publishers in the vain hope that we’d run a review of one of them (I think in three-plus years we did… one or two? Maybe?). Most of these books were run-of-the-mill – think 300-page potboiler crime novels, …