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Wednesday, 3 August 2016

Garnwen round barrow?

Here is a repeat of an earlier post......more than 4 years old.   I was interested at the time in the scatter of white quartz.  Will try and check it out.  It's  another possibility for the wondrous proto-Stonehenge which now competes with the Holy Grail as the most desirable lost archaeological artifact......

Saturday, 11 February 2012

Garnwen, Brynberian

I found a strange reference to Garnwen, Brynberian.  Here, on the south side of the road and about a km from Craig Rhosyfelin, there is a "record of a possible barrow."  The grid reference is SN112351.  Apparently there is no trace of any archaeological feature, but there is a scatter of white quartz fragments -- which presumably led somebody to think of Newgrange and a possible disappeared round barrow.  Of course, it may simply be that in this area there is an outcrop of Fishguard Volcanics with a particularly rich concentration of white quartz veins........

Not sure if Richard Bevins and his colleagues have looked at this site during their field sampling of the local volcanic rocks.......

http://brian-mountainman.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/garnwen-brynberian.html

2 comments:

TonyH said...

Others have found links beween quartz as tools and rock art. There is an important article, "Rock Art, digging up a mystery", British Archaeology, September - October 2012, pp 14 - 21. Talks about discoveries through excavations at the famous Kilmartin, Argyllshire, landscape, with its prolific extent of cupmarkes and carved rocks.

The article, by Andrew Jones of Southampton University and others, talks about them looking at 2 roches moutonnes, glacier smoothed, in a "wrong" lowland setting, and the rocks were unscheduled ancient monuments.. A Swedish archaeologist from Gothenburg initially helped Jones because of his own expertise in Sweden.. The final result has been that quartz, flint and pitchstone has been found between the 2 rocks. Quartz pebbles were also demonstrated to be efficient tools for carving the rock art.

TonyH said...

Myris and others may know that Hugo Anderson - Whymark found quarz pebbles were efficient tools for carving the Kilmartin rock art. When he had finished his experimental archaeology sessions doung this, his pebbles looked like the hammerstones excavated at one of the two rocks (Tiger & Lion Rocks).Hugh took part also in the Stonehenge Riverside Project.