Revisited 17/10/08 following a long, long overdue first visit to the hillfort sited - strangely enough - on the summit of the hill above and to the east.
A neat little cairn-circle, which would be well worth a visit if situated within a car-park in Luton...... but here, with a sweeping - frankly awesome - vista of Tremadog Bay and the Dwyryd Estuary, topped by the mountains of Central Snowdonia and the peaks of LLyn... well, words fail me, they really do.
Probably the finest view from a stone circle I've seen (Ardgroom, Moel-ty-uchaf and, I guess, Pobuill Fhinn run it close), this is arguably one of the finest, most exquisite sites of the British Isles. And possibly one of the least well known. Perhaps there's a connection to be had there, so the irony of this post is not lost on me.....
I had intended to move on and see Bron-y-foel-isaf, but that must now wait for another day - the attraction Moel Goedog has upon the visitor is simply too powerful.
The cairn lies to the W of the track. There is a wonderful panorama across Tremadog Bay. The ring is ca 6m wide with ca 11 upright and 7 fallen stones. The tallest stone at the WNW is 0.85m high, 0.7m wide and 0.15m deep.
Frances Lynch in A Guide to Ancient and Historic Wales: Gwynedd gives the following:
"It is a ring cairn, similar in design to the upper circle but with taller stones set at regular intervals on the inner edge of its low stone bank. Four of these stones have been missing since the 17th century, so new ones were placed in the original stone-holes when the monument was excavated and restored in 1979. These added stones have been marked with a deep T cut into the back.
The interior has been levelled into the slope and several pits had been dug before it was covered with a thin layer of stones (only surviving in the northern quarter). Some of the pits had been dug close to the inner edge of the bank, others were in the centre of the ring. The pits contained various deposits - charcoal alone, charcoal with scraps of burnt human bone, and burnt bone alone, the product of a 'normal' cremation burial. In one case the scraps of bone had been previously buried near the coast (to judge by the soil around them) and had been reburied up here. Some of the bone and charcoal was in pots typical of the early Bronze Age, some just poured directly into the pits.
This evidence indicates that a variety of activities had taken place within the circle. Some of them are matched at other ring cairns in the region; others - the reburial of bone for instance - were unknown before this excavation, but have since been recorded in south Wales. There was evidence to show that the various pits had been dug at different times, and radiocarbon dates suggest that the circle was in use between 1700 and 1400 BC."
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