The Carn Llwyd "Lost Embankment"

 Thanks to Hugh Thomas (of Preseli 360) for allowing me to use this splendid drone image of the strange embankment on the north side of Carningli.  The little dolerite tor of Carn Llwyd is very close -- just off the left hand edge of the photo.  This is the best image I have ever seen of the feature.  I have featured it before, on a number of posts.

The photo shows the summit of a gently sloping hillock or ridge.  As we can see, there are four little segments of an embanked circle, with one of them slightly offset from the others.   It's about 1 m high, and there are traces of a slight ditch on the outside.  So what we are looking at is around 45 degrees of embankment on a circle that -- if it ever had been completed -- would have had a diameter of between 120m and 200m.  There is no trace at all of any other embankment remnants on or near the assumed circumference.

The best guess is that this might have been intended as an embanked and palisaded fortified enclosure designed to contain and protect both human beings and their animals.  Maybe the project was abandoned when the tribal elders decided to develop a fortified "village" right on the summit of Carningli; and we have no idea whether the embanked segments we see today date from the  Bronze Age or the Iron Age (or maybe even Neolithic).

That's all very boring, and is unlikely to satisfy the members of the Stonehenge Bluestone Cult. So Hugh has suggested that maybe this is Pembrokeshire's "Lost Embankment"  -- or all that was left of it after the rest of it was dug up and carted off to Stonehenge to be reconstructed there.  That would have involved rather a lot of sturdy Neolithic tribesmen,  beavering away with their antler picks and shoulder blades over several decades around 5,000 BP, removing the embanked circle bit by bit, and  traipsing off to Stonehenge with their leather buckets filled with sacred soil and rubble.  So why did they do it?  Ours not to wonder why -- we just have to believe, according to current archaeological practice,  that they were intelligent human beings who had their reasons..........  

Sounds absurd, and of course there is no evidence for any of this, but we all love a good story, don't we?  And this is inherently no more absurd that the idea of a lost stone circle at Waun Mawn being dismantled and hauled off to Stonehenge by those selfsame Neolithic ancestors.........

But here's a thought -- Hugh couldn't possibly have been joking, could he...........???