Latest Fieldnotes

Well wierd.
Did they just give up?

A double first for me. Not only was this the first time I’d been to Arbor Low but this was also my first Derbyshire circle. What a way to start.
I just smiled and smiled.

Visited 18th April 2003: We parked in the yard in front of Longhouse Farm, and followed the footpath north east to Carreg Samson. There’s a concrete track most of the way, but it’s a bit muddy from the cattle. I reckon an adventurous wheelchair user could get very close to the site with a little bit of help.

The cattle own Carreg Samson, or that’s how it looked as we approached. Luckily they were just inquisitive bullocks, using the chamber as a sun shade and scratching post. They took a shine to William, and we got close up to them under the capstone. It was all very friendly. The fact that cows can fit under the capstone gives an indication of the size of the chamber. It’s whopping, and I had no trouble standing at the northern end to admire the lumps of quartz in the rock. What an amazing site. It must be second only to Pentre Ifan amongst the burial chambers of south west Wales.

As well as the cows we met a very friendly and extremely posh couple who had come to visit the chamber. If I recall correctly, her mother lived at the farm as a little girl. Sadly no folklore was forthcoming, but the gent entertained William with some simple magic tricks. Just goes to show, you can meet people at Carreg Samson.

Visited 17th April 2003: I might be able to shed some light on why Chris couldn’t get close up to the tomb. There’s a sign on the gate with an unfriendly message on it (I can’t remember the exact wording) plus a barbed wire fence and an electric fence in the field where the chamber lies. The farmhouse is relatively close by, so you get the distinct impression you’re being watched.

None of this was too much of a deterrent to me until I realised that the field was full of crops I decided to go no further (aggravated trespass is a crime, and I’m a good boy at heart) and took some photos from the edge of the field. It’s a shame that access to the site is so poor.

According to G.E. Daniel (in The Prehistoric Chamber Tombs of England and Wales) this site is of the ‘earthfast’ type, but this is contested by others because the level of the ground where the capstone rests may not be original. Apparently the tomb not oriented towards the sea, but towards Milford Haven Sound (not that I could really tell from the distance I was viewing from).

The walk to the circle from Robin Hood’s Stride is beautiful. You see the stones in a field up ahead, you see the farmer between you and the stones, the farmer smiles and waves you on.. you’re there... Stone groove.
Lovely stones in a beautiful setting. Each stone is fiercely individual. The stone with all the deep depressions on the outer face is my foxy favourite,
the stone in the wall looks too shy to join in.

This beautiful outcrop is the most dramatic of the area’s proto temples.
The first circle builders must have been awe struck by this landscape.
Walk up to it from the B5056 along the limestone way breathe it all in, and then look across the fields to 9 Stones Close...breathtaking!

This beautiful stone greets you as you walk up onto Stanton Moor from the south.
It’s a fun sphinx

I arrived at the school at playtime and it was mental.
I Mooched over to the office/staffroom to get permission to visit the stones. All the teachers were in the staff room drinking tea, they were very nice but I found the whole experience rather unsettling...the staffroom ...erghhhhhh bad memories.
I also had in the back of my mind the recent case of a council wanting to ban photography in and around schools. Fortunately this school is very welcoming to strangers and shows no signs of PC police holding sway here.
Of course this doesn’t mean that you should just wander into the place without first getting permission.
The carvings are lovely. They were locked behind a fence when I was there but I was still able to get a good view , although it would have been nice to touch them. The sun was fairly high so the shadow wasn’t too great but you could still appreciate the beautiful designs.
The children have created their own monument next to the carvings which is lovely.
The round house is coming on well too.

This is the megalithic section of the Ure Swale Landscape, this bit was built by folk from the moors, ‘stone people’ as their contribution the sacred landscape...
“we’ll ‘ave nun o’ yer fangled swaimish henges,
Tell ye what tho’ I can get thee some reet lovely geet big stanes.
Did thee see that job I did at Rudston?”

For me these rude fellas are a gatepost to the North Yorks moors. They stand beside the ‘Great North Road’ and beside the two main routes onto the moorland plateau.

I think I may have cup-mark fever, is it me or..........

No rampant badgers today, But the new housing developments seem to be gradually stalking the site!

Visited 26th April 2003: Dad looked after William while I explored Devil’s Dyke. I wasn’t alone. There were hoards of kids on bikes at one end, playing some sort of game that was leading to tears. Being off duty, I did the responsible thing and walked the other way.

The sun was doing well getting through the trees, and the bluebells were out, so it was all rather pleasant. The dyke is really quite deep in places, tapering off at each end. Getting from one side to the other is tricky, and because the sides are steep and eroded by generations of bike riding kids. Not a good place to visit for anyone who’s not sure footed, but an excellent place to take kids (Dad assures me he took us here, but I don’t remember it). The best parking for Devil’s Dyke is on Ceaser’s Road.

The Slad is on private property, and not visible from he road as much more than a line of trees. The southern end of the Slad peters out into a long curving pond, which you can just about get to from he road.

What a place! The road leading up to the track is a normal seaside town suburban road. Bungalows and terraced houses with clipped front lawns and twitching net curtains. All very nice and Stepford.

The track leads up past some allotments, and then the fun starts.

Most of us carry a plastic bag to put rubbish in when we visit sites. I think this place would need a fleet of dumper trucks. In a walk of less than 500 yards, I saw 2 mattresses, an armchair, 3 large gas canisters and countless bags of assorted household refuse. I seriously thought I’d strayed onto the council tip at one point, and if it weren’t for the GPS telling me I was getting close, I’d have given up.

Very very sad. I’d planned to continue on to look at Thunder Barrow, but was so depressed by what I’d seen when I reached the stone, I turned back to the car.

Impressive stones, but spoilt for us by being fenced in and in close proximity to ugly farm buildings and road.

We also could only count 11.
There is a stile to get into the field so you need to be agile. There were sheep with lambs in the field so take care in Spring not to alarm them. Lambs seemed to find stones excellent for climbing practice!
It is near the villages of Holywood and Holywood Station, just off A76 heading north. Not well signposted so look out carefully for it.

A large grass covered rubble ring, approximately 18x15m in diameter. The width of the bank varies between 1m & 5m.
There is a large gap to the north. It may be a ring cairn, although J.Barnatt suggests with it laying next to wall stone quarries it may be a robbed cairn.

From the standing stone on Smelting Hill, follow the wall along until you reach a large disturbed barrow. Over the wall here, go to the far side of the field. The ring/robbed cairn is near the edge between 2 small walling quarries.

Excellent views.....nothing really to see of the cairn.

Visited 17th April 2003: This stone is in a field of lush pasture, so I decide to exercise my right to roam (somewhat prematurely) and take a closer look. The field is a lot bigger than it looks, and the stone is lot further away from the road than I expected. I’d anticipated a short jog, but the journey turned out to be quite a run (with a commando style roll in the middle to get under an electric fence).

I realised why I’d misjudged the distances when I eventually stood next to the stone. It’s really rather large (none of the photos I took convey the real size of it). I  remember thinking that it wouldn’t look out of place at Avebury. A short run back to the car, and we headed off to the next Devil’s Quoit, trying to beat the sunset.

Visited 17th April 2003: Actually it’s an over statement to describe this as a visit. The Harold Stone is on private land, so I’m guessing access is a potential problem. We were pressed for time because the sun was setting fast, and I had in mind a visit to the Devil’s Quoit. I decided to cut my losses and stop short of trying to get close to the stone. I settled for this photo taken from the road.

Visited 17th April 2003: I thought that a visit to Pembroke castle was going to be a break from prehistory, but there’s no escaping it. The Wogan is an enormous cave underneath the castle, which was incorporated into the defences in the thirteenth century. It was used intermittently as a shelter from the Palaeolithic period to the Mesolithic. It’s likely that it was also used during the Bronze Age.

The cave is enormous, and impossible to photograph with a conventional flash. There’s a spiral staircase leading down to it from the castle, and something called a watergate (i.e. a big wall) blocks the original entrance except for a gate and a window.

As well as the Wogan, there’s an Iron Age connection up on the surface. It’s widely believed that the castle was built on the site of a promontory fort. The original defensive ditch that the castle used, and by implication the fort, was subsequently filled in. This makes it impossible to prove or disprove the Iron Age fort theory without digging up the site.

You have to pay to get into the castle to visit the Wogan, but it’s a great castle, so I’d recommend it.

Visited 17th April 2003: This isn’t the sort of site I usually post up on the Modern Antiquarian. I’m never all that sure about holy wells on a Web site about pre-history. Their credentials vary, and I can’t claim any particular reason for thinking that the well at St. Govan’s predates the chapel.

Having done the scepticism thing, I can heartily recommend St. Govan’s well and the nearby chapel as a place to visit. Both are, at the very least, amazing examples of Celtic Christian sites, and the setting is spectacular. If you can visit off season then you might get the place to yourself, which is something special. I’ve visited St. Govan’s so many times, it feels comfortingly familiar.

As well as the saint’s well, there’s also a smaller well inside the chapel. This is much less impressive and usually fills up with litter. Also part of the chapel is a strange roofless anteroom that has the natural rock face as two of its walls. Inside is a niche within which are unusual natural markings, presumably made by thousands of years of water erosion. Perhaps this place did represent something special to our pre-Christian ancestors. I’ll have to try harder to image it all without the chapel.

Visited 17th April 2003: If ever a site was inappropriately named, this is it. The Long Stone is now a short stone, reduced to a withered stump. It looks like the damage to the stone might be the result of weathering, because it’s made up of some sort of sandstone (apologies to Geologists out there, but that’s my best guess). I wonder what it looked like 100 years ago.

There’s no public access to the stone, and you can’t see it from the road, but there is an appropriately placed hole in the hedge quite near it. I think this may be one of those sites you should visit, before it’s gone for good. Rather a sad place really, especially as it sits in the shadow of the oil refinery.

Visited 17th April 2003: After the Harold Stone this was a bit disappointing. We would never have known the stone was there just by passing, because it’s largely embedded in the hedge bank. It was the lady from the bungalow by the Harold Stone that told us about it.

Since the visit I’ve had a quick look at the site on the NMRW, and it’s listed by different organisations in different ways. I’m pretty sure there are more stones we missed when we were there, because the site is described as standing stones (by Cadw), a stone row (by the RCAHMW), and a possible stone circle (by Cambria Archaeology). That’s assuming that we’re all talking about the same site.

Visited 17th April 2003: The Harold Stone is on private land, with no public right of access. Having said that, I’ve never been made to feel so welcome visiting a site on someone else’s land before. To cap it all, this stone is in the back garden of a bungalow. The couple who own the bungalow have got used to people visiting the stone, and they have a very easy going attitude to the wide variety of beliefs held by those who come. They told us numerous stories about people visiting the stone, including archaeologists, coach parties of tourists, Ley Line hunters and stone hugging Pagans. After we’d seen the stone we were invited in for a cup of tea in their kitchen while the boys slept in the car.

Apart from the warm reception, it was a warm and sunny day, and I was very pleased to see the Stone. It’s a striking lump of rock, almost white with lichen, except for the upper surface which is green with beautiful hairy lichen. Before she left us to look at the stone on our own, the lady who lives at the bungalow pointed out some distinct fluting at the base of the stone. She has been told that the fluting may have been carved into the stone by the people who put it up to ease the process of fixing it into the ground.

The stone is up above the sea cliff, apparently visible from the coastal footpath that runs between the garden and the cliff edge. There are beautiful views from the garden out into St. Bride’s Bay, but the gentleman who owns the bungalow told me the weather can be a problem because the plot is so exposed (something we talked about for a while because I live on top of a mountain, and we had numerous anecdotes to swap). What a pleasant visit! We’ll definitely be going back as soon as we get the opportunity.

Above ground, this site appears to be a solitary standing stone, albeit an impressively large one. However, a combination of ploughing and excavation in the late 1960s and early 1970s revealed this to be the visible remains of an archaeologically interesting area. Two further stones lie buried to the E of the standing stone, at distances of 7.80m and 12.15m, aligned E-W. Close to the eastern boundary of the field, again buried, are three further stones arranged in an arc that would suggest a circle of around 9.0m in diameter, just to the S of the E-W alignment.

Around 1887, a cist was uncovered near the standing stone, and was found to contain a food vessel, which made its way to the museum at Blair Castle. Coles described it as being “found in a cist in the haugh near Tom-na-Croiche, which is the name of the ground at the standing stone.” In 1969, John McBeth, the farmer at Balnaguard, found a short cist while ploughing 12.0m to the NW of the stone, at the highest point of a slight rise. Upon excavation, the cist was found to have a partially-cobbled floor. Several finds, including an upturned beaker sitting on sand in one corner, are now in the National Museum. The cist was filled in, and the cover stone now lies at the edge of the field (NN 9455 5205).

In 1971, further excavations took place. The earth around the base of the standing stone was removed to a depth of 0.25m, revealing 7 cup-marks on the S face. Another cup-mark was found on the prostrate stone closest to the upright one. The three buried stones in an arc at the field boundary (NN 9468 5209) were found to be set amongst apparent cairn material of fist-sized smooth stones, covering an area of 6.10m by 3.65m. This was under a layer of 0.25m of plough soil, and was itself 0.3m deep, resting on the sandy subsoil of the field. Under the NE section of these stones the subsoil was found to have dark stains, and produced some cremated bone, carbonised wood, and a small rim sherd possibly from a food vessel. Further S from this area, a thin flat slab of 2.3m length was also found. No socket was found, so it is possible this may have been a cist cover.

Visited 15th April 2003: Bedd Arthur was as far west as we walked along the Preseli ridge. I was really proud of William for walking all the way without being carried at any stage along the journey, so this posting is dedicated to him.

What a strange site Bedd Arthur is. My gut feeling is that it’s prehistoric, but how you categorise it I’ve no idea. Some people regard it as an ellipse of stones, and others as a rectangle (depending on how you join the dots in your head). Apparently it’s regarded as a hengiform monument, because there are traces of a bank around it (not that I could see them). As for it’s situation, the site overlooks Carn Meini and the Stone River, which can’t be coincidence.

The place has quite a special feel to it, possibly because it’s so isolated. By the time we got there it was nearly evening (much later than intended) and there was simply no one about. Apart from William’s noise it was tranquil. I wish we hadn’t been so tired by the time we got there. With the prospect of the walk back (at three and a half year old speed) hanging over us we didn’t stay as long as I would have liked.

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I’ve posted a view from Bedd Arthur towards Carn Meini on the Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn part of the site.

All hail to this mighty burial chamber! All wind and all rain, too. To reach the beast, I galloped the quarter of a mile through the tall wet grass in the field in inadequate clothing clutching an all-too-small umbrella to protect me from the horizontal, angry hailstorm.

But I wanted to inspect the GIANT weetabix capstone, the beautiful construction of the stones supporting it, the whopping chamber beneath it. The appalling weather made it feel very intimate, not only because I had it entirely to myself, but also because from beneath my umbrella my field of vision was severely impaired, so the massive pylon looming over it so closely was completely irrelevant to me. The rivulets of water streaming off the stones made them glisten with life and despite the dull lighting conditions, the photos I took showed the stones off as shiny and wonderful.

I marvelled at Tinkinswood’s great size and shape, it reminded me of Belas Knap, but without the swelling of Belas’ reconstructed mound. Tinkinswood is more collapsed and flatter. Was it always thus?

Despite my cold, saturated trousers I felt happy and inspired by this place. Carole, waiting for me in the car, could hardly believe that after having spent 15 mins out in the storm I could return to the car smiling. That’s the power of Tinkinswood.

Ooooh! So cute! and standing just 20 metres or so from the kissing gate at the edge of the field its beautiful silhouette on the horizon. I ran up the field excitedly towards this little house of cards but made in stone, its simplicity of construction and symmetry a sheer delight. It provided perfect cover from the appalling weather for a moment until curiosity forced me out from the dolmen’s cover in order that I investigate the context of the field in which it stands. The weird low western light, the stairrods-rain and the shimmer of long wet grass revealed the original shape and size of the long barrow of which this dolmen would have once been a part.

Love it! I’d love to return here on a sunshiney day with a flask of Earl Grey and a selection of interesting cheeses. A little Jarlsberg anyone?