Eighteen-year-old Ollie Nancarrow mowed a giant phallus into a field to greet Donald Trump as the US president flew into Stansted airport this morning. He’s not the first to employ such imagery

The schoolteachers of your childhood won’t agree, but some drawings of penises are extremely big, and actually quite clever. As Air Force One approached Stansted on Monday morning, it is nice to think of President Trump looking down to see his first words of welcome from the United Kingdom, “OI TRUMP”, mown into the grass of an Essex field beside a penis and testicles.

What is clever here is not the argument against Trump’s many questionable policies and statements, although the words “climate change is real” were mown in another field nearby. Rather, it is the nous of an 18-year-old entrepreneur called Ollie Nancarrow, who wanted to get attention for his business Born Eco, and succeeded. Even great artists are seldom original, of course, so we should also note the pioneering work of Rory McInnes, who in 2008 painted a phallus on the roof of his parents’ mansion, where it remained for a year; the military pilots who keep drawing penises in the Arizona sky, and the year-11 pupils at Bellemoor school in Southampton, who achieved a similar effect with weedkiller.

One positively elegant protest took place in Bury in 2015 (and was followed by tributes in Saffron Walden and Middlesbrough this year), when an anonymous artist signing himself “Wanksy” sprayed penises around the area’s many potholes. “They don’t get filled. They’ll be there for months,” Wanksy said at the time. “Suddenly you draw something amusing around it, everyone sees it and it either gets reported or fixed.”

Bury council saw things differently. “The actions of this individual are not only stupid, but incredibly insulting to local residents,” a spokesman said, wrongly. “Has this person, for just one second, considered how families with young children must feel when they are confronted with these obscene symbols as they walk to school?”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Drawn to scale’ … Chris Packham with the block of wood delivered to his home. Photograph: Chris Packham

Chris Packham was more effective in his withering of a recent penis protest, against his support for a ban on shooting wild birds. In a short video posted in April, he produced a block of wood with a small, crude drawing of a penis on it, which had been sent to his home. “What I like about it most,” he said, “is that whoever drew it has drawn it to scale, based upon their own genitalia.” He later sold the object on eBay, raising £2,550 for the very cause - Wild Justice - that it was sent to protest against.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest National treasure … The Cerne Abbas Giant, in Dorset, England. Photograph: Geoff Moore / Rex Features

In general, it seems hard to object to giant drawings of penises in this country, since we already protect one on a Dorset hillside as a scheduled monument. The Cerne Abbas Giant is often talked of vaguely as an ancient fertility symbol, but a substantial school of thought considers it a satirical protest against Oliver Cromwell. It is nice to think that our ancestors were puerile protesters as well.