A fabulous photo from Serena Davies (on Facebook) reminded me that at the foot of the crag in the middle distance is a perfectly splendid prehistoric quarry. It has all the characteristics one would expect of a quarry -- worked faces, trackways, piles of rubble left behind, suitable rock type etc. It's probably a Bronze Age / Iron Age feature, and it was used for the provision of lumps of rock and slabs used for the creation of the Foel Drygarn burial mounds and for the embankments of the fortified settlement on the hill summit. It was not used for the extraction of monoliths, but for lumps or rock that could easily be carried by one or two men.
I have described the quarry (or quarries) here:
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2017/04/foeldrygarn-prehistoric-quarries.html
https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2018/10/the-prehistoric-quarries-at-foel-drygarn.html
I mention this just in case anybody should think that I have an obsession with proving that prehistoric quarries did not exist anywhere! This one is very convincing, but intriguingly it is hardly ever mentioned by archaeologists.
When it comes to Carn Meini, Carn Goedog and Rhosyfelin, I still maintain that the "evidence" for quarrying at those sites has been entirely fabricated by archaeologists with vivid imaginations.
The three burial mounds and the fortified embankments at Foel Drygarn. The quarrying for stone was done beneath the crags at bottom left.
4 comments:
Shared this on Facebook. Trying to ensure at least SOME folk realise the whole truth of where SOME prehistoric quarrying evidence is plausible rather than dubious or non-existent....There are some sensible and experienced archaeologists with open, unbiased outlooks and what is pulled at us all from certain individuals/ projects about Preseli "quarrying".
Kindle typo!
"pulled" should be "PULPED" (i.e. through ejaculatory tabloid - style headlining of speculations)
Yes, and there is of course abundant evidence of quarrying on Waun Mawn too -- ignored by MPP and the merry gang. I refer to the quarries in my Waun Mawn article, which has now been read over 4,300 times on Researchgate. The traces are quite spectacular -- but of course those quarries were for building slabs, and they were worked largely in the last few centuries.
MPP and colleagues' efforts on Preseli have been undertaken under the auspices of "The Stones of Stonehenge Project". As you perceive, they did all this in a very one - eyed. gung ho, fashion. Very strange, given MPP's and also Josh Pollard's experience in the Stonehenge, and in Pollard's case, also the Avebury area - with the " Between The Monuments" research and fieldwork.
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