Alternating colours indicate different messages.

(NOTE: Personally, I liked the post below. It shows how shapes can be made from road systems. The "Brighton Boat" is probably easier to "make" because of the plethora of roads. Our "High Man" figure was mostly present on the 1778 Taylor-Skinner map of Louth, at a time when there were far fewer roads and the figure stood out more. And in any case, there's undeoubtedly very little mythological or astronomical evidence to back any of these shapes up - Anthony)

Have you ever seen these?

http://www.gpsdrawing.com/gallery.htm

This is the so-called "Brighton Boat". It's not very fair to compare this with the High Man. Here, there are so many roads to choose from. In the 1778 Taylor Skinner map of Louth, the High Man is very obvious because there are virtually no other roads to select from.

I love this one ... http://www.gpsdrawing.com/gallery/land/bboat.htm
and this one http://www.gpsdrawing.com/gallery/land/belephant.htm
and this one http://www.gpsdrawing.com/gallery/land/oxdonon.htm
and this one http://www.gpsdrawing.com/gallery/land/nbutterlfy.htm
and ...

The torso of Orion always looked more like an hour glass to me :-)
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Anthony,

I'll tell you my opinion. As an astronomer, and one particularly interested in archaeoastronomy, I think it's a distinct possibility. We have examples all over the world of large figures that can only be seen from the air, many of them much more distinct than this, yet people still call them rubbish. Why not in Ireland? I feel that it has more credence of being from an astronomical nature than maybe some of the others because of the rich myths of the area and the great astronomical knowledge we know these people had. Personally, I think all of our ancestors had more knowledge about many things than we do today. A reverence of nature leads to science. Science is not meant to be learned and applied in isolation as we teach today. I loved your site. It is beautifully laid out and very informative.

I normally just lurk and learn, but felt the need to comment on this.
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On the other hand, he's no oil painting, so clearly we have no means of knowing for sure, just by looking, if he is deliberate or a chance pattern. So then, it's down entirely to the placenames/folklore thing. But that worries me - how many placenames and folk references are there to choose from around there? In choosing the apparently relevant ones, are you doing the same as the brighton boat - being able to construct a picture because there are such a large number of components to choose from to make it? I don't know. It's something I'd need to get my head round before I could get confident about the issue.
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Not refuting or accepting the existence of this, but noting that the Nazca lines were unseen yet served a processional route, the pathways depict creatures and geometric shapes so my point I supose is do you have to be able to 'see' it? But egads, 12 miles is stretching my imagination...
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"Giant" is such a subjective term. In this day and age it conjures up B-Movie images such as the "50 Foot Woman", but in earlier times much less stature was required to earn this appelation. For Example early anthropological literature discribes the Watusi Tribe (average hight around 7 feet) as "a race of giants". Given that the average hight of Irish males is somewhere around 5'7"-9" I'd think even a six and a half footer would qualify as a "giant". My father's familly is quite tall for Irish men (all the males are over 6 foot) and my cousin Pamela and I, who're both 5'8", were called "giantesses" once the high heels went on more often than I care to remember :-(

"Giants" in the legends are usually attributed by scholars to "bardic exaguration" IIRC. Certainly they couldn't be extraordinarly large as they were able to join others indoors at feasts etc without needing especially large doorways, high roofs, or furniture.

Anyway the really huge "giants" who's footsteps left lakes and so on are all in later folklore rather than early legend. Fin Mac Cool (Fionn Mac Cumhail) is man-sized in mythology but a giant on the scale of Paul Bunyan in later folklore.

In old irish "giant" is "aithech" rather than the modern "fathach", anyone care to comment on the difference in size (if any) between Aithech and Fathach? I always understood Aithech to be a big bloke and Fathach to be the Fin Mac Cool look-alike: am I wrong?

Who knows what the Old Irish saw in the sky? In my own lifetime I've heard Ursa Major called The Great Bear, The Plough, The Big Dipper, and The Wain (wagon), and I know the Ancient Egyptians saw it both as an Adze and as a bull's Hind Leg (which happened to be a hieroglyphic logogram for "strength" btw). No doubt when the Old Irish played the join-the-dots game (if they played it at all) they came up with something familiar to their own time and culture.

Finding a "giant warrior" drawn out on the Irish countryside doesn't prove that the Old Irish recognized "Orion" as a constellation, or that the man in question is somehow responsible for the ancient heroes being called giants. Sounds like putting the cart before the horse there. Wouldn't it be more likely to be the other way around - that if the Old Irish believed in huge giants that the "man" was made huge because the hero he depicts was called a giant?

I think the first step is finding some evidence that seeming alignments and apparent geoglyphs were deliberate and not something that's being read into the landscape. As my granny used to say "If you read between the lines you'll see what you want to see because the only thing between the lines is blank spaces".

Barbara
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I'm in no way totally dismissing it, but I'm very wary of any Damesian claims. As I said: I remain unconvinced.

Whilst looking I did find a mammoth spread right across Counties Dublin and Kildare, with its arse hovering over Lucan. I'm not sure what that tells us :-)

"Other people have said it would be easy to look at any road map and pick out a shape ... "

Actually it isn't. It's really bloody difficult! When I did trace it for myself the other night I was quite impressed that anyone had seen at all. My mammoth exists, but I couldn't see much else.

One of the biggest concerns I have is that the sword isn't particularly sword-like is it? It's rather club-like in fact.
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