postman

I don’t know how this little blighter passed me by, I first saw it on Coflein and then found that Rhiannon had already added it as a site here. Good isn’t she.
It’s been on the list for about three months.

When travelling west on the B4500 you come into Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog ( or Llanarmon DC for short ) a sharp left hand turn takes you over an old bridge, just before the road takes you left turn right up a steep narrow lane.
Pass Penybryn farm house, and keep going until the road leaves tarmac behind, I parked on a grass verge well out of the way and the fort visible on the hill top. Walk up the track til your just about east of the fort and a large boundary (?) stone is by a fence. Go through/over the gate and walk up hill to the trees, aptly or not called Roman camp wood. Apt or not coflein assures us the fort is definitely iron age.
I skirt along the south side of the trees and shortly arrive at the eastern extreme of the fort, it’s in the trees to my right as well but i’ll look in there on my way out.
I start the obligatory circumambulation round the fort, at its south east corner the ramparts are fairly slight and mellow. Oddly there are many large boulders in and next to the ditch, some are in lines and may be instructive in how to build an iron age fort, a chunk of the bank has eroded away exposing the interior, definitely instructive.

Walking west along the southern ramparts i’m sure I came across the worn down entrance, then twenty yards on another one. Then a fence cuts the fort in two, on this side of the fence it’s all farmy and agricultered, but on the other side it’s more wild, rough and more Welsh, I skip the fence with glee (I wasn’t singing).
The banks here are higher, the ditch is deeper and there’s no boulders in the ditch, I follow the rampart north. The rain is now coming at me sideways, blown into a near explosive force.
I make for the quartz outcrops on top of the hill but outside the fort, they make an adequate windbreak and the position affords a great view of the fort and all the quartz running across its summit, i haven’t seen anything like this much quartz since Duloe or Henblas, there is more here.
I cross back over the well preserved western ramparts and make for the quartz crown at the top of the fort, it’s still raining, so I sit among the giant white boulders and regard the northern aspect, the ramparts run by in front of me from left to right, and the hills beyond rise up to Vivod mountain. Back out into the stingy sideways rain (ably deflected by my new coat ‘n boots) I follow the earthworks east, they are still high and defendable here. But now ive come back to the trees, so it’s over the fence once more and a short snoop later and ive detected a good section of ramparts, though coflein says there is another entrance nearby. I think it must have been back near where I started, about twenty yards from where I finished.

So this was a little gem of a fort, and i’m non plussed as to its obscurity, even without all the tons of quartz it would still be high on your list of North Walean hill forts.
Come on a warm summers eve though ay?

I parked right at the end of the thinning road near the farm Swch-Cae-rhiw, there is room for maybe two cars. The footpath starts here, going north up hill through the farm. It was steep and tiring, I wondered whether anyone at the farm saw me struggling to get up, new boots, that’s my excuse.
The path follows the river on its western side, map says there are water falls but they are further up, and the path is taking us away from them, up and over the top of the first hill, it is here that Coflein says are two cairns and an associated standing stone.
The Berwyn mountains supply the high ground that takes up all the western horizon, south east looks down the Ceiriog valley, it’s high ground all round really except for the river valley, and in that direction I can see the hill with a fort Cerrig Gwynion. In fact the whole placement of the cairn, the position of the fort, it’s almost identical to Craig ty Glas and Craig Rhiwarth.
themodernantiquarian.com/site/14474/craig_tyglas.html
The cairn, Coflein says, is nine meters across, it is very easy to find. A small walkers cairn has grown upon it, whilst elsewhere large stones betray the vestiges of the cist, especially one long on edge stone.
But there are two cairns here, however, I don’t know which one i’m at, the northern one or the southern one, so in case it’s the former I have a look around down hill until the ground falls away too steeply to seriously expect a cairn to be there. Then back up hill scrubbing around in all the bunches of thick reedy grass, but nothing, no other cairn. I couldn’t fathom it, so I just kept on going until I found what must be the standing stone that Coflein says is associated with the TWO cairns.
It was in the right direction from the cairn, compass agreed, it was also the right size, 0.8 meters. But then they fail to mention the smaller stone next to it, this other stone is almost certainly part of the same, now, broken stone. They even neglect to mention the thick quartz whiter than white stripes running through it. Tsk.
The crosses on my map said that the still to find cairn should be smack on line in the middle of this stone and the other cairn, so off I stride confident that if it’s there I couldn’t but help to at least stumble across it.
Nope, nothing, its not there. 5 x 0.3 meters across and high. Couldn’t find it.
Great views though, nice place.
Windy.

North west of Cerrig Cynant stone circle is the last of this hillsides ancient delights, another ring cairn. Coflein gives the same name to both ring cairns, Bryn Poeth Uchaf (or Isaf) but calls one a cairn and the other a ring cairn, this is apparently the ring cairn, but they both are really. Aren’t they?
The ring cairn is not on top of the hill, it’s positioning when compared with it’s sibling over there is more normal. Perhaps it was meant to be seen from the south by the farm house maybe. The ring is mostly just lumpy ground surface, I had to circle it entirely to make sure it was what we were looking for, and discovered it to be much more together at it’s southern end, I guess that’s what you’d expect if that was the direction from which you were looking up the hill.
That horrid reedy grass has taken over the inside of the circle but amid all this precious wild life habitat I saw a bigger stone perhaps a foot and a half long ???
So that was that, it took three years but I had to see it, I had to get there, you know, I just had to. The day was now drawing to an end, the sun was low and by the time we got back to Carreg Garn Fawr it was most definitely home time.
Sciatic leg saw to it that the drive was nothing short of torture, the prices we pay sometimes far exceed money.

After having just been to Bryn Poeth Uchaf ring cairn and been partly blown away by the site and the views, we headed optimistically in a north north west kind of direction. Running across our path was a linear earthwork, an old wall or dyke or something, anyway, from on top of it I saw a stone, a standing up one.
This is it, I knew this was it, a kind of euphoria spread through me, having failed to find it last time I came, by what I could now see was a mere couple of hundred yards. Drat.
We set about uncovering all the stones, a big one lay on it’s side on the eastern side, the tall pointy one I’d seen on the dyke was at the south end, smaller stones had to have grass pulled away to recover them. The ring is perhaps two thirds complete, Alken counted ten stones I think. On it’s northern arc it seems to have gone completely unless that is where the smallest stone are, and are now all underground. Tony, go and get your mates, oh yes, how sad.
The views were more set back into the immediate landscape, so although the view south was long it didn’t have the impact as from the first ring cairn.
One more ring cairn to find, north west of Cerrig Cynant stone circle.

There’s no easy way to get to this trio of sites, you either drive or walk through the forest immediately west of the sites or walk in from the south, having just seen Carreg Garn Fawr. I’ve tried the forest route once before, but having got onto the hillsides cold and wet children’s feet got us sent back to the car early. Very disappointed.

This time turned out to be considerably more rewarding. We leave the cairn and quartz stone behind and follow the path that skirts along the tree line, until a farm track takes us right and down towards the farm house that is I think also called Bryn Poeth Uchaf. This wasn’t the right way, initially,
The man who’d seen us through his kitchen window came out and asked us something, we didn’t quite catch what he said but we went over to tell him of our plan. He explained that a woman from Cadoo (Cadw) had come over not long ago, pointed across the valley and said that the bump on top of that hill was suspected by her of being something ( how she didn’t know it was already on Coflein I don’t know), oh, and he was from Cardiff originally.
He didn’t know there was a stone circle up there somewhere, and I don’t think he knew what a ring cairn was. He was however kind enough to point out the easy way over the small river and we had the run of the hillside, run being an expression obviously.
Having crossed the river we didn’t run up the hill side and not knowing really where to start we headed for the pointed out hill top bump. Getting nearer we could see a few tantalising somethings poking up out of the bump.
At the bottom of the hills hill top was a small squadron of large stones, clearance most likely. Then were up and on top of the bump and the somethings are indeed stones, one of them is very much like a stone circle stone, not one you’d expect of a ring cairn.

The ring is at one point about a foot high but on it’s opposite side it fades away into the ground, it is at the higher part of the ring that the two or three stones poke out of.
The ring is on a narrow north-south ridge, gentle slopes on the west but steeper on the east. An unusual place for a ring cairn, and a decent ring cairn it is too. But the view is surely what brought the cairns builders here, an uninterrupted view of the big mountains of the Brecon Beacons, those in the know will know their names but I’d only be guessing. Snow has fallen on their tops, sun shine is falling them now and some low clouds make them look like a distant heaven.
After having wondered at the ring cairn and its mesmerizing view we depart, and wander up the ridge and to the west looking for the star of this hillside Cerrig Cynant stone circle.