Tomb of our forefathers reveals the secrets of Neolithic times
There’s a little-known Welsh burial site on the outskirts of Cardiff that’s older than Stonehenge. Thomas Deacon delves into the ancient history of Tinkinswood...
JUST a few miles outside Cardiff stands one of the most important but little-known monuments of Welsh history.
More than 6,000 years old and a mind-boggling feat of ancient engineering, the Tinkinswood burial chamber reveals what life was like in Wales thousands of years ago.
It’s shrouded in legend and is almost 1,000 years older than Stonehenge.
The Neolithic tomb in the Vale of Glamorgan, near Dyffryn Gardens, is topped with the largest capstone in Britain.
It measures a massive 24ft by 15ft and weighs about 40 tonnes, the same as an articulated lorry.
Experts believe that at least 200 people would have been required to help hoist it into place.
Cadw, the Welsh Government body that looks after historic sites, says the site is linked to a number of legends.
It’s said that anyone who spends the night there on the evenings before May Day, St John’s Day on June 23 or Midwinter Day would die, go mad or become a poet.
Another myth says that the stones scattered around nearby are local women who had danced around the burial chamber on a Sunday and were turned into stone.
The remarkable site is even more ancient than Stonehenge, believed to be just over 5,000 years old.
During the coronavirus pandemic, social media expert Owen Williams (@OwsWills) compiled a series of threads on an array of little-known wonders spanning 220 million years.
Owen recently visited Tinkinswood, describing it as a “quiet, eerie place” and the capstone as “gobsmackingly massive”.
Excavations over the years have found the remains of 50 people, along with broken pottery and flint tools.
The National Museum of Wales said: “The fragmentary nature of these bodies suggests that it was not the individual burial that was important to the tomb builders, but the creation of an ancestral bone pile.
“Few grave goods are found in these tombs, at most a few broken pots and a handful of flint tools. It is likely that what ceremony occurred to honour the dead took place outside of the chambers.
“Together, the bones, grave goods and the tombs themselves provide one of the main sources of information about life and death in southeast Wales during this remote period.”
Tinkinswood has had a number of names and was once known as Castell Carrigan, meaning the Witch’s Castle.
Other names include Tinkinswood Long Barrow, Tinkinswood Cromlech, as well as Castell Careg, Llechy-Filliast, Maes-y-Filiast and Gwal-yFiliast
The National Museum of Wales added that Stone Age tombs are relatively common in Wales.
The monuments typically consist of one or more chambers built with massive stones. They would have originally been covered by a mound of earth or stones, but this rarely survives.
Many of these tombs were made to a common design, and in south-east Wales this often takes the form of mounds where the wider end points eastwards and opening to a forecourt.
The internal chambers are accessed by short passages leading from the forecourt or the sides of the mound, the museum adds.