With Eric in tow we arrived suited and booted and on time for the winter solstice sunrise, I know it's tomorrow but i'm off work today so it will have to do.
Unfortunately the weather doesn't give a damn what I want and the sunrise remained stubbornly veiled behind cloud. I bet the sun shone at Stonehenge.
Unable to prove or disprove any solar alignments, which are most likely to be casual and arguable rather than obvious and easily proved.
Oh well winter comes round every year, but I don't.
The fallen stone is still fallen, I wondered whether to re-erect it but I didn't have any strong women with me so I left it. On this my third visit, the area has taken on a new guise, I had often wondered why they didn't use bigger stones there's plenty of them around.
But having just watched the Equinox sun rise from behind the biggest sharpest mountain on the horizon and found it beyond coincidence, I just had to go to this here stone circle and see if that same mountain is visible from there too. The circle has two outliers which may have confused some visitors, but standing behind one stone and looking through the circle to the horizon the mountain (moelfre Uchaf) is in a perfect line. The other outlier bisects the circle centre at an angle of about 120 degrees the mid winter sunrise line .I couldn't believe no one had mentioned it before. I'm off to the lakes for winter sol, but I'm beginning to wish I could be in two places at once.
One of these stones in the wide-spaced ring had fallen – Jane and I resurrected it, appropriately enough, on Easter Saturday. The method we used might not have been the same as that of the ancients, and was definitely not approved by the HSE. Jane lifted the stone from between her legs, as I shoved it from behind, until it was virtually up her fundament. Interesting interpretation of phallic rocks. We packed its base with smaller stones, and left it balancing.
Under the crackle of a very nearby pylon, this tiny, fragile circle has somehow survived in this sacred Tal-Y-Fantastic landscape. The fourteen small stones are all very loose and wobbly, and close investigation revealed that many of them were not set into the earth at all, but placed into rubble sockets. One of the taller stones had fallen over. So treaclechops and I carefully stood it upright again into its rubble socket. No doubt the next time a sheep farts within five metres of it, it'll be over again.
On the 18th September, a stone in the NW(ish) of the circle was on the floor next to it's socket, 2 other stones were very close to ending up the same way.
A low and broad circle, hard to spot amid the grass. If this were anywhere else it would be for the fanatical only but as part of the whole Tal-Y-Fan experience it is a must.
.. after this, a second circle of the same dimension, with only five large stones remaining; but with a circular cytt or house, 5 feet in diameter, inside the circumference. Our guide informed us that according to local tradition these were called cerrig y pryved, "the stones of the flies."
Pryfed does mean flies, or bugs, or generally small creepy crawly things, according to my dictionary. 'Pryfaid' doesn't feature at all? or is it a kind of made up plural?
From some Correspondence from H. Longueville Jones to Archaeologia Cambrensis in vol 1, p76 (1846).