As I make the Fan Dringarth ridge, the thick grey cloud is now right over my head and the temperature drops as I walk into an increasingly strong wind. Here I meet a group of three walkers, the only other people I will see on the whole of the walk today. At length the summit of Fan Llia comes into view ahead, a straightforward plod to the top. The summit itself, at 632m OD, turns out to be marked only with the concrete base of an otherwise vanished trig pillar, but enjoys very decent views of the surrounding peaks. The cairn is further south, off the very highest point but still on the summit ridge. Unfortunately, as I get to within 100 yards of the cairn, it starts to hail, the wind blasting the icy bullets straight into my face. Not the nicest way to make your first site of the day!

Even less nice is the poor treatment that has been inflicted on the cairn itself. There is the usual turfed footprint of a large cairn, boasting excellent views to the south that are lacking from the summit and emphasise the obvious reasons for its positioning at the end of the ridge. Sadly, the mound itself has been badly “altered” by walkers. The stones are flat slabs of sandstone, heaped up into a somewhat shapeless pile. Other, larger slabs have been leant and propped up around the perimeter, giving the whole thing the air of half-built neglect. It’s difficult to respond to such a wilful lack of respect with anything but anger.

All that said, the setting is terrific, even the ongoing hail doesn’t detract on that score, although it doesn’t help photography much! It’s too cold and windswept to linger here for long, body temperature quickly dropping when not I’m moving. Besides which, it looks like a cruel up-and-down to get from here to Fan Nedd, the next summit on my route and so I head westwards off the top, not following any particular path but making generally towards the visible block of Maen Llia far below me. Needless to say, the hail stops within a minute of leaving the cairn.

In a line between the standing stone and my route is a green mound, which will prove to be the Rhyd Uchaf cairn. To get to it, there are a couple of deceptively steep-sided streams to cross. Although ruined, the placing of the cairn is nicely judged, on a little knoll surrounded by various tributary streams of the nascent Afon Llia, the water source that may well have provided the inspiration for the siting of the little complex of monuments here and of this cairn in particular.

The cairn is separated from the Maen Llia monolith by the Afon Llia itself, fast-flowing and not as easy to cross as it looks, with peaty banks quick to crumble underfoot. But cross I must, as the pull of the stone, one of South Wales’ undoubted megalithic stars, is too much to avoid for long. This will be my second visit here. The last time I came with a friend by car and to be honest I had little hope of ever making it back here under my own steam. It’s a wonderful, wonderful stone, enjoying a lovely view down the valley between the two steeply rising mountains that flank its either side. The shaggy coat of moss gives it a primordial look, and even years’ old graffiti can do little to undermine its towering charm.

I spend a good while here, undisturbed by any other visitors, although an empty car is parked nearby. Time stops briefly, and I recharge for the next and steepest of today’s climbs. When the time comes to bid farewell – adieu hopefully – I do so with some sadness. This is a site that rewards the effort of getting here tenfold.

A ladder stile leads onto the tussocky lower slopes of Fan Nedd. There is no obvious path and so I’m left to pick a route that is reasonably direct to the summit. Due to time constraints after the lengthy stop at Maen Llia, I’ve decided to abandon a visit to the two cairns on the eastern slopes of the mountain and to concentrate on getting to the top of the mountain. I confess to a certain feeling of unfinished business here. A couple of years ago I came here a matter of hours after Gladman had been (small world). On that occasion the slopes were snow-covered and going was slow. My friend and I made it to the pointy cairn on the ridge in a hailstorm (what is it with these tops and hail?) and very stupidly mistook it for the summit trig point marked on the map. As such, we didn’t reach the summit and I’ve been keen to come back and rectify the error. So today I head straight up the mountain’s eastern flank. This proves to be very hard going, the slope is very steep and the vegetation is ankle-knee deep. Only the occasional stops to look back at Maen Llia, dwindling into a black dot below, and the unfolding view of Fan Llia across the valley, make the ascent anything other than a trial.

But reaching the ridge, close to the trig, the views to the west make up for the aching knees. Once at the summit (663m OD), the views to Fan Gyhirych and Y Mynydd Du are magnificent and far-reaching, clear of the clouds of earlier.

From the summit it’s a fairly easy stroll north along the ridge towards the “pointy” cairn. About halfway along the ridge I come across a recumbent slab, unworked but with a hole drilled in it. No-one is likely to have ever put a fence up here, so perhaps a fallen boundary stone? The pointy cairn is every bit as ludicrous looking as the last time I came here. But what’s this? It rests on a turfed over mound of much greater diameter, with stones protruding through the thin covering. Suspicions start to grow and I get the feeling that the walker-made pyramid conceals something much, much older. The positioning is typically clever, allowing the maximum panoramic view, particularly northwards, absent at the mid-ridge summit. It is certainly similar in construction to the cairn on neighbouring Fan Gyhirych.

[A post-visit Coflein check suggests that the instinct was correct and that these are the remains of a bronze age cairn, positioned with the usual fine attention to detail.]