Bronze Age Cairn Bagging
cambrianescapes • 19 June 2020
Forget bagging Marilyns, Munros and Wainwrights, the highest points in the Cambrian Mountains & Brecon Beacons are often marked by Bronze Age Cairns – and there’s plenty to bag, too.
4,500 years ago our climate was warmer than it is now. The population steadily increased and Bronze Age people settled across the uplands in areas that seem incredibly remote compared to our modern day dwelling preferences.
These isolated settlements left behind them a legacy of standing stones and Bronze Age Cairns and there’s also often remnants in the landscape of long huts and mounds, groups of fields and stock pens where they worked the land.
The three highest peaks in the Cambrian Mountains, Pumlumon
(752m), Mynydd Mallaen
(462m) and on Drygarn Fawr (625m) all have Bronze Age Cairns with breathtaking views. There are three cairns on Drygran Fawr – two have been rebuilt and stand at an impressive 2.5m high and 5.6m diameter. There are two on Mallaen about 25m diameter and three on Pen Pumlumon Arwystli.
In the Brecon Beacons National Park, there are 14 Bronze Age Cairns – including on Pen Y Fan
(886m), Corn Du
(783m) and Fan Y Big
(719m) and Cribarth
(428m) – though you can no longer call these peaks isolated.
There’s lots of speculation about what they were for. They could be burial mounds – however, one on Mynydd Mallaen was dug up in the1930s and nothing was found. The preferred school of thought is that they were territorial markers, representing ownership, community and identity. When you walk up towards Drygarn Fawr,
the rebuilt cairns are visible for miles around and, when you look at maps of the locations of upland cairns (plenty of time to do that in lockdown), you can see that they would have been crucial landmarks in the vast upland landscape.
The cairns are only part of the story – impressive for their size and their position, they are often joined in the landscape by nearby standing stones. On Mallaen, there are two stones – Maen Hir (or Men Hir) and Maen Bach, marking the route towards the Crugiau Merched
– and they pretty much line up with the cairns.
Maen Llia, between the Senni Valley and Ystradfelte is one of 30 standing stones in the Brecon Beacons National Park - at nearly 4m tall it’s visible from miles around in the wilderness it stands in. It is believed that there is at least another 1.5m below ground – that is some effort to get it in situ.
There are also plenty of stone circles to explore, created (we think) to celebrate significant times of year based on planetary, sun and solar activity and seasons, like solstice, important to our prehistoric ancestors.
So never mind the trigpoints, once lockdown is lifted, I’ll be off on the Bronze Age trail because our prehistoric ancestors knew all about bagging the best views.
The Bronze Age Cache (this is by no means an extensive list)
*There’s 14 Bronze Age Cairns in and around Abergwesyn alone – two of the three on the ridge of Drygarn Fawr have been rebuilt.
*30 standing stones in the Brecon Beacons National Park
*Hundreds of standing stones and stone circles in the Cambrian Mountains
*There are two Bronze Age Cairns on Mynydd Mallaen – Crugiau Merched or Ladies Barrows
Two standing stones plus evidence of long huts, barrows and fields
Cambrianescapes
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