To celebrate the first day of spring, I think this is a representation of the Green Man. I could be wrong here – he’s not quite as verdant and covered in plant life as other Green Men.
Anyway, it’s a nice little sculpture above the door of Lloyds TSB in Blue Boar Row.
A couple of good websites on the Green Man:
- The Green Man – Mike Harding’s website
- Wiltshire Green Men – a wonderful collection of 102 photos of Green Men in Wiltshire
Update: I had a really interesting exchange of emails with Katy, one of the people who runs the Wiltshire Green Men website on whether or not the Lloyds TSB man is atually a ‘Green Man’. Katy says that:
I think we could say the carving you have photographed is a kind of green man, a woodland king of some kind…The website update contains a page ‘Who is the green man?’ with my attempt to classify the different variants, and I think we could put him into the ‘non-standard form’ group along with foliate skulls, double-heads with saplings growing from them, and – ahem – tombstones to Mr Greenman. What has become clear since Chris and I began this project many moons ago is that the form is very variable, in Wiltshire at least, and while some scholars no doubt would want to be very strict and confine the group solely to foliate heads and foliage-spewers, we tend to be more easy-going and include those with foliate eyebrows, peepers, green animals, accidentals, and the other non-standard forms.
Katy also noticed something which I hadn’t – the cover of the book below, Salisbury in Detail, is actually a Green Man. I’ve had the book for some time, and a photo appeared as an advert on the sidebar of the website for a few months, but I’d totally overlooked it.
This Green Man is on the Wetherspoon’s pub in Bridge Street. I’ll post a photo of him in context shortly.
