Cairn, upon a woodland saddle Round Cairn View all content for Cairn, upon a woodland saddle

After parking near Gellilwyd farm in a one car layby follow the path west between two conifer plantations, the cairns are to your right and unmissable. Some cairns are more famous than others, they somehow attain a name be it a Giantesses apronful or a Greyhounds lair and so on but some cairns remain unnamed and unseen, then when it comes to being added to an ancient monument record and no name is known who gets to name it and how do they choose its name to be handed down through the generations, spreading further than anyone could guess, what if anything was going on in the mind of these cairn namers. The Cairn upon a woodland saddle, it does sound kinda nice, evocative of summer playtimes maybe, but there are no trees here now, just spikes and hay. What exactly the hay is I dont know, its all over the place and can be picked up so its not growing, it doesn't half cling to dog fur and obscure stones. The cairn is twice as big as it looks the stones dissappearing under the hay and gorse, several miles south is Cadair Idris, just 80 yards to the north west is the kerb cairn and twenty yards east is what looks like a smaller cairn though it doesnt really look llike a cairn, it has a whiff of hut circle to it. The mountain views are breathtaking, as are the views down into the valleys, I wondered for a while why they are sited here, alright there are good views but that wasnt the reason i'm sure, the best I could come up with is, the folk lived down hill from here but were so totally awed by the landscape they wanted to get close but not too close to the mountain so this was a half way measure, they didnt even dare to build the cairn in site of the summit instead making sure a small closer hill obscured it, but the summit of Craig Las was considered less of a blasphemy(?). Just 100metres further west and the whole mountain would be in view, but for some reason this little place in a woodland saddle between two small hills was just right. I hope ive made no sense what so ever, as this is just how the ancients make me feel, they had a big space to play with yet chose the least inspiring corner of it. I dont know, I just dont know.

Posted by postman 25th April 2010ce

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