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Fieldnotes
| Mynydd y Gelli, as this site is also known (somewhat optimistically) as "the Welsh Stonehenge"' (Burl, 1995: 174). I've not heard this site referred to as Rhondda Stonhenge before. Like the English one, though, what's left is being ruined by pollution. No trunk roads here though just a hole full of stinking plastic bags. This place is paradoxiaclly grim and breathtaking. At the end of a winding road from Gelli up to a massive landfill site there is a stile. Heading west, the site is easy to miss. You're instinctively drawn away from the line of the chain link fence that divides the encroaching stenching land fill from the magnificent hillside views to the North over to Rhondda Fach.You then miss the site. At the edge of a plateau some few hundred yards west of the rings are a number of equally spaced partially buried stones. Outliers dot the slopes below. This would appear to be what Burl (op cit) refers to as "the wreckage of three more dubious cists". Dubious or not, this was once a special place for ritual and ceremony. Look around at the views and the alignments! Rhondda-Cynon-Taf, the local authority have only vague records of this ancient monument and, with an absence of landmarks for map reading and a Quatermass land-fill getting nearer all the time, finding this site was hard work on a foggy day in March 2002. The rings are next to the chainlink fence on a ENE-WSW axis. Burl reports them as being 10.2m by 9m in diameter. Ignore Burl's directions. Follow the road to the landfill site and get out by the gates and lorries. Follow the fence on the brow of the hill to the site. None of the stones are taller than about 75cm, the OS map doesn't record the circle by name, nor does it record the growth of the landfill (a local politcal hot potato) instead it coyly records "Cairns". For now Taffhenge or Tiphenge, remains sadly neglected and seldom visited. |
Posted by RedBrickDream10th August 2002ce Edited 28th March 2006ce
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Comments (2) |
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| Thanks for your info, I am hoping to visit this site in the near future :) |
Posted by jdhlearning 3rd January 2016ce |
| It's a good time to go, the stones are very small so the shorter the grass the better. |
Posted by thesweetcheat7th January 2016ce |
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