Arthur's Stone Visit

 I was invited to join a party of friends to do the guided tour of the Arthur's Stone dig yesterday.

We met at the Swan for lunch, in the garden.  One couple had driven up from East Sussex, and were meeting us on the way to visiting family in Presteigne, so they turned up a bit late.  We ate from the sandwich menu, and the portions were generous, and came with crisps, some of which ended up going to the blackbird who was hanging around watching us - who can't have been really hungry because we watched him wrestling with a huge worm when we arrived.  I had the pulled pork and mozzarella on ciabatta, which was delicious.  

Then we realised that nobody actually knew the route to the dig - I'd been before, but I only knew the bus route to get to the bottom of the hill, and Julia wanted to avoid driving up that hill if she could.  I was in the second car, following Julia, and we lost her at the Hardwicke turn into the Golden Valley, where she went straight on.  I guided the second car via the bus route, and we got to the dig a little bit late for the start of the tour.  Fortunately, Julia turned up shortly after  that, so we joined Amber from English Heritage, who was explaining what they found last year in the field below the monument before moving round to this year's trench.

The archaeologist in the picture is drawing a section of the dry stone wall in front of him, which was part of the monument.  Beyond him is the passageway into the main chamber of the tomb - the bit that looks like the Stone Table in Narnia (and CS Lewis did visit the site, so it had to have been his inspiration).

Another famous visitor I wasn't aware of was King Charles I, during the Civil War, when he used Arthur's Stone as a rallying point for his troops in the area - so it was a well-known landmark back then.  King Arthur, despite the name of the site, is not known to have been a visitor, and in any case he could only have visited it about 4,000 years after it was built.

The rest of the stones in the picture (I think I've got this right) are the remains of the collapse of the drystone wall, which was sealing off the passageway.  They think the passage way was quite a bit deeper than it now appears, and of course had capstones covering it, under an earth mound.  As it appears now, it would have been pretty difficult to get the remains of the dear departed into the main chamber, as anyone would have to crawl down the passageway.  However, the main stones are not being touched by excavation - the trench here is as close as the archaeologists are allowed to get.

One of the students on the dig had just completed emptying out this depression in the stones, which they think may have been a kist, or secondary burial within the mound, rather than depositing the remains in the main chamber.

Finds have been pretty rare, but they did find a piece of something that isn't quite obsidian, and which came from either Scotland or Northern Ireland, around the Giant's Causeway area, since it is volcanic rock in origin.  This is proof that people were moving around, and trading, over those distances.  They also found a rather nice flint arrowhead.

All the finds, from all the years of the digs, are being kept together, so they can be analysed at the end of the dig.

Across the road in the field there were two more trenches (one with a plastic pipe running through it!)  where the archaeologists were trying to find the extent of the monument.  There's a rise in the road as it passes the Stone, indicating that the monument may extend under the road, but they didn't know how far it might have gone.  Some similar sites are very big, so they were hoping to find an edge to it.

Further off in the field there was another, much deeper trench, cut through a depression in the field with parch marks, indicating that there was something underneath the grass.  This turned out to be small quarries of the same flat stones that were used for the drystone wall around the Stone.  There are small quarries all over the place locally, but this one was not marked on any maps, and there haven't been any finds yet to give a date.  However, any quarries from the Romans onward would have taken all the stone that was useable, whereas these quarries had a lot of stone left behind, as if they were choosing just the stones they could use for one project and rejecting the rest.

It was a fascinating tour, and Amber had a full schedule - earlier that afternoon she'd taken the Woolhope Group around (the Woolhope Group had a dig at the Stone in 1901, when regrettably vague notes were taken on their findings) and as we left, she was guiding another group around the site.

Then it was back to the Swan for tea and scones in the garden - a really enjoyable afternoon, with some lovely and interesting people!