1990-4 | stonechasing

The next day, we drove back across South Wales to catch the ferry for Ireland. But instead we were detained and questioned for 8 hours, missed the ferry, and spent an extra night in Wales, thanks to that blurry photo on the Severn Bridge back on the 1990-3 page.

The longer version of the story can be found on the Blather page.

After they turned us loose, we decided to make the best of it and continue our tourist adventures. We found a little hotel in nearby St Davids, had a nice meal, and then went to see the Bishop’s Palace.

Bishop’s Palace, St. David’s

St. David is the patron saint of Wales, and the site goes back to the 6th century, but most of the buildings are from the 13th and 14th century.

It was locked up, so we climbed the fence. It was a pitch black night and it was scary dark. We saw something weird. Next day we came back, paid the entrance fee, and had a look around. Found nothing scary or weird.

Arthur’s Stone aka Carreg Coetan Arthur

Arthur was a busy guy in Wales. I imagine it’s a bit like “George Washington slept here” signs in old inns in New England.

The capstone rests on only two of the uprights.

A dolmen is sometimes called quoit here. Or a cromlech. In this case, carreg means stone in Welsh; coetan means quoit. So it’s Arthur’s stone dolmen.

Pentre Ifan

This elegant dolmen dates from around 3500 BCE. These are the Preseli Mountains, where the bluestones at Stonehenge came from.

By the time we got back to Rosslare, we were so so glad to be home. It was an unfortunate end to a fantastic weekend. I had seen so many wonderful things and had so much fun, but I also got a tiny glimpse into the powder keg I’d been hearing about on the news every morning.

Lough Crew

The Lough Crew complex is a cluster of passage tombs on four hilltops in County Meath, not far from the Boyne Valley complex. There are at least 20 passage tombs here; most had not been excavated in 1990. Two of the larger ones had been reinforced and were locked, but we got the key from a local guy. (Again, with Harbison to thank.) They are dated to roughly 3,500 BCE.

The first hill is topped with this large mound, which would have originally been covered with earth. That has all eroded down to the stones now. You can see the curbstones around the outside.

It boggles my mind to consider how steep these hills are, knowing the weight of those curbstones, and every damn rock in that mound had to be brought up there. These would have been major engineering projects.

There were four smaller passage tombs circled around the large one. Long ditches ran between the four.

Some of the smaller ones had collapsed and were accessible, so of course we climbed around in them. They all follow the basic format we’d seen at Newgrange: an entrance to a passage leading into a central chamber.

The people who reinforced it created a little sunroof in the ceiling, which you can see in this picture.

The large ones were aligned with the sunrise for the spring and autumn equinox.

Someone had gone over the surface with chalk, I suppose to make the carvings more visible. It’s a double-edged sword: neglect brings deterioration and the opportunity for vandalism, but the tourist industry takes its own toll. A quick search online tells me you can get guided tours and have a nice cup of tea at a cafe there now. I’m glad I got to see it while it was still remote, empty, and largely forgotten, but I do hope the tourism guarantees some protection for this amazing art and the sites in general.

We scrambled down and began the climb up Hill #2. I tried to pick a route that wasn’t too steep (down as well as up) but it turned out to be very steep anyhow, very rough. We had to cross a bunch of fields, climb over a bunch of fences, scare a bunch of sheep… all standard procedure, but by the time we got to the top of Hill #2, I was exhausted.