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Standing Stone / Menhir
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Visited 20th June 2003: I found the stone more tricky to find than I'd expected. From the A40 it was shielded by trees, and some patchy map reading on my part meant we over-shot the turning. There's parking next to the old training camp reception building (a strange 1960s construction) and from here you can hop over the service road to the stone. There were a couple of army vehicles way off at the end of the avenue, behind a typical MOD fence, but it does look like this camp is closed.
The Growing Stone (aka the Cwrt y Gollen Monolith) is surrounded by cobbles, and the remains of a wooden rail are still partially intact on one side of it. Now it looks a bit shabby, but I'd imagine the MOD were very pleased with it when the work was done (nice and orderly). In the Modern Antiquarian book Julian describes removing a rusty sign from the stone, and I could make out the place where this used to be fixed.
The monolith is made from a very large piece of sandstone (apparently 4.17 metres high) and has the strangest strata running along it's length. You can see why people thought it had popped out of the ground. As with Gwernvale, the A40 intrudes on the site, but at least the trees give it some degree of separation from the traffic.
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Posted by Kammer
2nd July 2003ce
Edited 4th August 2003ce
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