Tales of the Green Man in British Countryside

The Face in the Leaves

Look up in almost any old British church and you may find him. A face built entirely of foliage, leaves curling from the mouth, sprouting from the ears, unfurling where eyebrows ought to be. The Green Man is one of the quietest, most persistent figures in our carved inheritance, with thousands of examples surviving in parish churches, cathedrals, abbeys and — rather less reverently — above the doors of a good many pubs. He is almost never labelled, never explained in the guidebook, and yet he is there, watching the congregation file in beneath him.

Strictly speaking, the carving is a foliate head: a human face composed of, or disgorging, leaves and vines. Related are the leaf mask, where foliage alone forms a face, and the woodwose or wild man, a shaggy figure clad in leaves who appears in heraldry and on church bench ends. Most date from between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries, though the tradition of carving them never entirely stopped.

Where to Find Them on a Country Walk

You need not travel far. Any church of medieval fabric is worth a slow circuit, but a few spots reward a deliberate visit.

• Kilpeck, Herefordshire — a small Norman church with an extraordinary carved corbel table, foliate heads among the hares and wrestlers.
• Southwell Minster, Nottinghamshire — the chapter house is a masterpiece of thirteenth-century leaf carving, with faces hidden among the foliage.
• Norwich Cathedral — hundreds of roof bosses, many of them foliate heads, best viewed with binoculars or a hand mirror borrowed from a steward.
• Exeter Cathedral — a fine Green Man in the lady chapel, plus a wealth of corbels around the building.
• Winchester Cathedral — foliate heads in the presbytery, easily missed at eye level.
• Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian — famous for its density of carvings, with well over a hundred leafy faces claimed among them.

Beyond these, look at porch arches, font covers, misericords, roof bosses, gargoyles and chancel screens. Village pubs named The Green Man are scattered across the country, often on old drove roads and at the edge of former woodland — a name that has outlasted whatever sign once hung there.

Reading the Leaves

One of the pleasures of the hunt is identifying the foliage. Carvers were not casual about it. An oak leaf, with its lobed edge and acorn, suggests endurance and English timber. Ivy speaks of fidelity and everlasting life, since it stays green through winter. Hawthorn carries May associations and a whiff of protective magic. Vine leaves point towards the Eucharist and resurrection. A few heads sprout a mix, and a few are frankly botanical nonsense, but the effort of distinguishing them will slow you down in exactly the right way.

What Might He Mean?

Here we must be honest: nobody knows, and the Victorians, who loved him, invented rather more than they discovered. The name itself is modern-ish, popularised by folklorists in the 1930s. The carvings came first. Several readings are plausible, and may all have been true at once.

• A Christian emblem of resurrection — life returning from the dead wood, the old Adam reborn.
• A warning against wildness — a human face surrendering to the green chaos of sin, a caution preached in stone.
• A pagan survival — a vegetation spirit, a local lord of the wood, tolerated and quietly folded into the church fabric.
• An apotropaic guardian — a face to frighten off malign influences, set above a doorway or a window.
• A mason's signature — the carver's own joke, or a mark of the lodge, repeated building to building.

Living Traditions: Jack in the Green and May Day

The figure is not confined to stone. In Hastings, a Jack in the Green — a tall framework of hoops and greenery, worn by a dancing figure — is paraded on the May Day bank holiday, at the head of a procession of drummers and sweeps. In Clun, Shropshire, the Green Man is fought and defeated on the bridge each May by the Frost Queen, a piece of theatre that turns the season's turning into a proper scrap. At Castleton in Derbyshire, the Garland Day ceremony on 29 May still sees a king and queen garlanded in flowers. These are living customs, revived and adapted, and they carry the same ambiguity: the green is welcome, but it must be met, and sometimes beaten, before summer comes.

How to Spot One on Your Next Walk

Go with a torch, a pair of binoculars and patience. Start at the outside of the building: corbels under the eaves, the arch of the porch, the hood moulds. Then work inside, from the font to the chancel screen, looking at spandrels, bench ends, roof bosses and capitals. Lie back in a pew and check the ceiling; many the best bosses are only visible from directly below. Take a note of the leaf type, the number of heads, and whether the eyes are open or closed. Parish guidebooks vary wildly in usefulness — some note every Green Man, others ignore them entirely — so a small notebook of your own is worth more than most.

Keep half an eye out in the pub afterwards, too. Landlords have long been fond of the name, and a signboard Green Man may be the only one in the village still in daily use.