The Roman roots of the Dulwich Wood Penis Gang

If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise… in Dulwich Wood – a charming fragment of the medieval Great North Wood in south London – the self-dubbed ‘Penis Gang’ have been at work. The gang have been daubing huge penises, in red, black and green, on ancient tree trunks and branches. Sophia Money-Coutts, author and etiquette expert of our times, recently discovered the drawings as she walked her dog, Dennis, in the woods.

We prudish 21st-century westerners struggle to understand how relaxed the Romans were about genitalia

It’s all disgusting, of course. But the dog walkers of Dulwich can comfort themselves with the fact that penis graffiti has an ancient lineage. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the Romans were completely obsessed with their members.

Roman schoolboys, like all schoolboys, loved scrawling willies on walls and no doubt on trees too. In the 1st century ad paedagogium – a boys’ school – in Rome, by the Circus Maximus, there’s a graffito of an erect cock and balls in profile.