Re: Siting of Nant Tarw monuments - coincidence? | Forum

GLADMAN wrote:

tiompan wrote:

But for many (moderns ) , it's the hills ,sometimes in association with the heavens , that are salient as an explanation for the siting . It wasn't always thus and probably dates from Thom and the later popularity of Watkins . It can also be shown to be mistaken .

http://www.cpat.org.uk/walks/nanttarw.pdf . Points out that the cairn at SN 827 247 also has view of PyF as will other points in the area .

Apart from the awful pretend phenomenological nonsense of Tilley and Cummings there have been attempts at providing comprehensive objective studies on the siting of monuments in the landscape. Tim Philips with his study of northern chambered cairns and Tatjana Kytmanow 's on portal tombs come to mind .

The fact that other sites upon Mynydd Du also have a view of Pen Y Fan is, in my opinion, not relevant to Nant Tarw owing to the low lying nature of the latter. A monument upon a hill top with expansive views could potentially be said to align upon many things. The cairn cited upon Garn Las can not fail to have a view of Pen y Fan. Neither can that upon Foel Darw. The point at Nant Tarw is Pen y Fan can only be seen at the NW circle and stone row - as far as I could tell. I could be wrong. Move beyond these very limited localities and it is obscured by the hills.

A point to raise is I'm, of course, not at all sure what the landscape would've been like in the Bronze Age. Was it the bog it is now, the 'falling in up to your waist' sort of bog I had the misfortune to encounter? If so, why erect your monuments within such a landscape if there wasn't a pretty pressing reason to do so?

I doubt that it mattered . Some of the lower sites have the view , others don't and there will be other points with and without .
The writers of the pamphlet thought it might though ,that's why I mentioned it .

It could have been drier in the BA ,but building sites in what were certainly bogs at the time is not uncommon . Lots of henges and sites like Blackhouse burn seemed to revel in it .

Siting of Nant Tarw monuments — coincidence?