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Wied Filep

Dolmen / Quoit / Cromlech

<b>Wied Filep</b>Posted by salsImage © sals
Latitude:35° 55' 10.74" N
Longitude:   14° 25' 53.09" E

Added by fitzcoraldo


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<b>Wied Filep</b>Posted by Zeb <b>Wied Filep</b>Posted by sals <b>Wied Filep</b>Posted by sals <b>Wied Filep</b>Posted by sals <b>Wied Filep</b>Posted by fitzcoraldo <b>Wied Filep</b>Posted by fitzcoraldo

Fieldnotes

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I guess I approached from the easy direction, as I pulled off the main road (Ghargur to Mosta) heading west from San Pawl tat-Targa Cart Ruts just before Mosta fort and with a group of houses to the left, and looked to the right and there was the walled enclosure!

Overlooking St Paul's Bay, dolmen A is the larger of the two with a capstone 3.6m x 1.7m supported on three (?) stones about 1.4m high; dolmen B is smaller, supported by the edge of the plateau on one side and low stones on the other - its capstone is about 3m long.
sals Posted by sals
24th January 2008ce
Edited 24th January 2008ce

In their wonderful book, Malta Prehistory and Temples, David Trump describes Wied Filep Dolmens as being "the most accessible" and as having "one of the biggest capstones" accessible and biggest, yeh, my kind of words.
Trump doesn't lie when he states that Weid Filep is accessible, it's right beside the road, trouble is you have to find the road. I spent a good part of half an hour driving in and around Mosta before I found the Dolmens. My tip is this, find the wadi on the outskirts of Mosta and head east along the road that parallels the steep valley. Take a look over your left shoulder and you should see a fort on the opposite hillside. Now wind your window down and listen. You should be able to hear the sound of dogs barking. So if you can see the sea, the fort and the wadi and hear the dogs then you are 'in the zone'. The noise of the dogs barking is coming from the fort which is the Maltese police dog pound.
The dolmen are situated on the edge of Mosta and can be found on a raised limestone platform beside the road. The monuments have been walled-in presumably to protect them.
There are two dolmen , they are both sat on the same limestone exposure and it is possible to see how the stone has been quarried from behind the dolmen to create the large capstones. Trump states that the largest of the pair is 3.8m from end to end.
As impressive as the dolmen were it's the setting that grabbed me. The dolmen are sat on a hillside overlooking a wadi with the beautiful Mediterranean Sea in the distance. A modern addition to this view is a huge limestone quarry, I guess some people could see this as an abomination but for me it's just another sign of continuity of the use of the beautiful Maltese limestone. Only the scale has changed.
fitzcoraldo Posted by fitzcoraldo
8th October 2007ce