Griff Rhys Jones Mrs Jones
In Wales, history stays exactly where it was put – just waiting to be casually encountered
Forget the adamantine rock around Pen Caer. I have. Or the details at least. The cliffs on Strumble Head in Pembrokeshire are among the world’s oldest: a product of an early lava belch in the Antarctic. They took their time to get to Wales. The aeons of tectonic shifting are too nebulous for me, so, as Mrs Jones and I walked out from Bwthyn, our cottage by the Afon, we restricted ourselves to a shorter period – just human history – as lived in this part of Pembrokeshire since the last ice age, over the past 6,000 years.
It was an evening walk. It took us, first, uphill, through bracken, by a seldom-used path, to the capstone of a Neolithic burial chamber on the side of Garn Gilfach. This great plate of majestic, whitened stone was heaved into place 5,000 years ago. I have been visiting this area of west Wales for the past 15 years, so I felt ashamed it had taken me so long to make contact.
It is massive. The flat amoeba-like lid appeared to be about 12ft across. Early Britons here liked to entomb their dead in homemade caves, created with herculean effort. The chamber beneath has never been excavated. Unbelievable.
There is another of these things in nearby Llanwnda. The slab there is held up by a pointed dolmen and gapes like a clam, facing deliberately and mystically towards St George’s Channel.
Garn Gilfach looks towards the bay of Abermawr, and best of all – marvellously, and just like Llanwnda – it sits alone, as if waiting to be casually encountered. There were no campervan parties of fake druidical hippies tramping up the path to “commune” with it (though it possibly predates Stonehenge). Nobody has come and added a useful informative signboard to the site, nor wrapped it in a square of protective barbed wire. The boulder just squats in the heather, and broods.
Moving on, past standing stones by “Lady’s Gate”, we climbed a short distance and 2,000 years to Garn Fawr. Here, 600 precipitous feet above the sea, are the remains of an Iron Age fort – a mere 3,000 years old. As any archaeologist will tell you, it wasn’t a “fort” but a village – defended by walls of sharp stones which now lie as lines of scattered rubble joining rocky outcrops of the hill. The original land divisions still cartwheel away from the place, as they were parcelled out in prehistoric times.
Heading down the hill, we fast-forwarded another 2,000 years along the “gateway to Wales”. In medieval times, Irish pilgrims landed at Goodwick seeking indulgences at the shrine of St David. They took their first night’s rest in the “hospital” field under Garn Fawr. This, of course, was relatively recently.
So “ancient”, “medieval” and then, finally, “modern”. Behind a cemetery, now occupying the site of the pilgrim’s camping ground, is a set of overgrown steps leading down into a stream. These were used to baptise worshippers at the Harmony Chapel, built in 1914: surely, in its way, as mystical an encounter as the ancient burial chamber on the hill.
It was a short walk. None of these markers were hard to identify because this landscape remains pretty much as our original ancestors found it. There is no big village. It is a dispersed settlement. The farms huddle into the clefts of the hills as they always did, even if the buildings are more recent: still an agricultural community like the one buried under that capstone.
I like history tours of London, too, but I could search in vain for the same incredible 6,000-year continuity. It is buried. Here, in far west Wales, history stays exactly where it was put, almost as a monument to our collective existence – a palimpsest uncovering how precious and involved and overwhelming our landscape can be.
I had walked through life in Wales in 60 minutes. Only the sad sight of an alien plantation of Sitka spruce, poking up grotesquely at the head of the valley, jarred at all. They’ll grow bigger too.
There are no campervan parties of fake druidical hippies tramping up the path to ‘commune’ with it