Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn

Also known as:
Carn Meini Chambered Tomb
Nearest town:
Cardigan (14km NNE)
OS reference:
SN140326
OS sheet:
145
Latitude:
51° 57' 36.83 N
Longitude:
4° 42' 26.93 W
Added to TMA by

Images

Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by thesweetcheat

The chamber, which looks like it could fully collapse any moment.

Image credit: A. Brookes (26.4.2022)
thesweetcheat
thesweetcheat Apr 12, 2023
Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by thesweetcheat

The huge capstone, looking towards Carn Sian and Bedd Arthur.

Image credit: A. Brookes (26.4.2022)
thesweetcheat
thesweetcheat Apr 12, 2023
Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by postman

Looking over Carn Menyn cairn to Carn Arthur.

Image credit: Chris Bickerton
postman
postman Mar 31, 2014
Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by postman

looking over the big capstone to watch the stone river run its way to the stone sea.

Image credit: Chris Bickerton
postman
postman Mar 31, 2014
Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by postman

Some kind of stone walling behind the cairn.

Image credit: Chris Bickerton
postman
postman Mar 31, 2014
Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by postman

Carn Menyn overlooks the cairn of the same name.

Image credit: Chris Bickerton
postman
postman Mar 31, 2014
Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by postman

The stone river has at its head, spring like, Carn Menyn chambered cairn.

Image credit: Chris Bickerton
postman
postman Mar 31, 2014
Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by postman

From near Bedd Arthur, the cairn is immediate right of the X.

Image credit: Chris Bickerton
postman
postman Mar 31, 2014
Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by Kammer

Visited 15th April 2003: This shot is taken from Bedd Arthur looking towards Carn Meini and Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn (marked with a red arrow).

You can also see the River of Stones winding it’s way down the hillside from the cairn. The black marks, mainly below the Stone River, are recently burnt scrub.

Image credit: Simon Marshall
Kammer
Kammer May 10, 2003
Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by Kammer

Visited 15th April 2003: From the south west, with a natural rock outcrop (that I have yet to identify) in the ditance.

Image credit: Simon Marshall
Kammer
Kammer May 10, 2003
Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by Kammer

Visited 15th April 2003: From the west, looking inside the burial chamber.

Image credit: Simon Marshall
Kammer
Kammer May 10, 2003
Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by Kammer

Taken 15th April 2003: From the north again, but this time a close-up of the capstone.

Kammer
Kammer May 10, 2003
Image of Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn by Kammer

Visited 15th April 2003: Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn from the north(ish), with the Stone River tailing off to the right of the shot.

Image credit: Simon Marshall
Kammer
Kammer May 10, 2003

Articles

Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn

postman
postman Apr 1, 2014

If I dont think about it too much then this site is probably #1 on my most wanted list.
Everything came together at the right time so Eric me and the dogs were leaving for the stones at 2am, it’s a long way and I wanted to be on site early, hence our ridiculously early start.
Five hours later.
We parked by the telephone box on the road south east of the cairn. We should have walked up the road a bit and entered the wilds just after the house called Glanrhyd, but we didn’t, we went up through the forestry place. It was hard going, especially when we left the track, trees had fallen down and now and then our way was blocked by ten foot high root balls, a solid wall of earth, root, rock and small bits of crashed UFO’s.

On the lower slopes, below the outcrops, the ground can get very boggy off the path (on the path too for that matter), progress was all right, only it went on too long, as Mr Thurber say.
Eventually we let the dogs pull us up to the top, mush, and once more I stand a top a Preseli Carn. But which is it, there’s quite a few clustered together and they’ve all got there own names.
Carn Gwr has two cairns by it, but today I only have eyes for chambered cairns, I could easily spend the whole sunlit part of the day exploring these hills, there is much to see.
But I must stick to the plan or I wont be able to see #2 on my must see list, just a couple of standing stones more and then were outta there.
We hop from rock to rock, I knew the cairn was next to a big rock stack, we’d gone through them
all and were down to our last one, there’s a lot of stone around here it has to be said, it took some time to find it, but in the end it was right where I thought it would be. With my usual alacrity I took us up the long way.

It was a touch on the misty drizzly side when we got on site, but it didn’t detract from the place at all, it lent an ethereal beauty to the place, we couldn’t see down to the road, the only distant places we could see was the other hill tops.
It is mostly like any other cairn, it’s round-ish, and is a stony hump in the landscape. But right in the middle of the stony mass is a whopper capstone nigh on three meters square, it isn’t square.
Under the capstone can be seen the fallen orthostats of the collapsed chamber, coflein suggests a Neolithic or maybe early bronze age date.
But most freaky of all is the stone river, a long curving line of boulders and assorted rubble maybe a mile long, I thought it was near or maybe next to the chambered cairn , but it’s much better than that the stone river erupts right out of the side of the cairn. What a place to put your cairn, genius, absolute genius, on Dartmoor they erect stone rows for the same purpose, what ever that is. But here the earth itself, time or glaciers does the work for you. Sublime.
Cant recommend the place enough, i’m extremely perplexed as to why only Kammer has posted on it.

Carn Menyn Chambered Cairn

Kammer
Kammer May 10, 2003

Visited 15th April 2003: On our way back from Bedd Arthur I left Lou and Will on the main path, and took Alfie off in the backpack to find this site. At the time I knew very little about it, as I’d only spotted it on the map quite late on.

To my surprise the site isn’t just a crumby old cairn, but quite a large old pile with an equally large chamber in the middle. The chamber is very low, so I wasn’t going to try and get inside. The position of the cairn is spectacular, standing at the foot of Carn Meini (the natural outcrop) and at the head of the Stone River. It’s the latter that’s really special, because from the cairn you can see the band of stone arching it’s way down the hill.

A detour well worth making, and had I done my research properly I could have gone to see it when we visited Carn Meini rather than as an after thought. I don’t think baby Alfie was especially moved by it all though.

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