Monday 29 June 2020

Penywyrlod Neolithic Long Barrow

I went back to the hills above Llanigon to go further back in time than the historic farmhouse.
This time, I went by the lanes to Llanigon and turned up by the Old Forge Garage to go up the hill. It wasn't as steep as the footpaths across Hay Common, but I was still pretty sweaty when I got to the stile, so I paused for refreshment:


I'd been looking up details about the long barrow on the Modern Antiquarian website, and some of the people commenting there said that the barrow was very close to the stile. I knew that wasn't right, because I had a vague memory of finding the site years before, so I set off up the hill and followed a track across a couple of fields.
I was starting to wonder if I'd gone too far when I went through the next gate into a field where a flock of sheep were sheltering from the sun in the shade of a line of hawthorn trees. I gave them a wide berth as I climbed up the hill, so as not to disturb them - and at the top, there it was!


The ground around it is pretty disturbed, so it's hard to see the limits of the original barrow that would have covered the burial chamber. According to the plans made during the Woolhope Society dig of 1920 - 21, the chamber was towards one end of the mound. They didn't find much in the way of artefacts, but the methodology of the dig was criticised, and later other archaeologists came to look over the spoil heap of the original excavation, where they found some flint, fragments of Beaker pottery, a Roman coin and some blue beads from what is believed to be a 6th century AD Saxon burial - which shows that the mound was visible and there was some memory of it as a place to bury the dead up to historic times. [Edited to add: I was using the book Prehistoric Sites of Breconshire by George Children and George Nash, from Logaston Press].
The original barrow was built during the Neolithic period, so roughly 5,000 years ago. The views from the barrow are very good, up the Wye and Llynfi valleys.
I decided to go on just as far as the next stile, close by - and beyond the stile was a lane, which must have been where the Modern Antiquarian visitors arrived at the site. I walked down the lane back towards Hay. On the way, I noticed several Red Admiral and Comma butterflies, and at one point I heard a pretty little bird singing from a nearby tree. When I looked it up back home, it turned out to be a male Stonechat, possibly the first one I've ever seen in real life!


This is a stock picture - the one I saw was too far up the tree for my camera to get more than a distant dot.

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