Gors Fawr has a rather pretty little circle of stones -- but I hesitate to call them standing stones because they are not tall, slim or erect. They are almost all less than 1m high. I doubt that any of them are deeply embedded -- they are best referred to as boulders simply placed or settled into position in a slightly distorted circle. They are a perfect height for sitting on -- so we will call them "sitting stones". Back in the Late Neolithic or Bronze Age, we can imagine the village elders sitting here in a circle, each one on his favourite stone, discussing the issues of the day rather as the community council does today. Does that sound frivolous? Maybe. But I find it hard to see any religious or ritual intent here -- although of course the setting is greatly revered by some, and many visitors claim to be impressed by its ambience or power .......
Think of Durham Cathedral at one end of the grandeur scale, and Portfield Gate Methodist Chapel at the other. Then, on the circle front, think of Avebury at one end of the scale and Gors Fawr at the other. This circle is so small and insignificant that it cannot possibly have been intended to be ostentatious or intimidating. It sits quietly in its landscape of wide horizons, mostly hidden from view but peeping out from behind the gorse bushes. (The local authorities have removed many of the gorse bushes that were crowding in rather too closely on the stones -- and we are grateful for that......)
The essential details. Thanks to Coral and Jack for publishing this drone image:
Most authorities think that the circle is made up of 16 stones. I think that only 15 stones really belong to the circle, with 3 or 4 other recumbent stones slightly "out of position" off the circumference. One of them, near the base of the above photo, is almost 2m long and has the best claim to be called a "pillar". I think that one was ignored by the builders of the circle, as inded were other elongated stones scattered about in the landscape.
Aubrey Burl thought that 12 of the stones are "upstanding" and that 4 are fallen or partly submerged in the turf.
It is often claimed that the stone setting is made of alternating spotted and unspotted dolerite boulders. I disagree with that. Having examined the boulders carefully, I think that only 5 or 6 are what I would call "spotted dolerite" -- and there is no sign of an alternating arrangement. The majority of the boulders are faceted and heavily abraded and weathered stones which have either been subjected to glacial transport (over a short distance) or to many thousands of years of exposure in a hostile and oscillating environment. There is nothing to suggest that the stone have been carried or dragged here from Carn Meini or anywhere else. Used more or less where found, I think. Some of the stones have cracks and breakage scars, but I would not say that any of them have been deliberately shaped. There is no stone at the centre of the circle. The spacing of the stones on the circle circumference is not very regular. The diameter of the circle is c 22m.
Some of the stones:
This is the only stone that would be rather uncomfortable to sit on:
This is the recumbent small "pillar" (unspotted dolerite) that I think never belonged to the circle of stones:
https://archive.org/details/guidetoancienthi0000rees/page/36/mode/1up?q=gors
https://thathistorycouple.co.uk/2025/03/03/gors-fawr-stone-circle/
http://www.stone-circles.org.uk/stone/gorsfawr.htm
About 140m from the circle (not 400m as claimed by Darvill and Wainwright) there are two very impressive standing stones, one very broad and imposing and the other (called the "dreaming stone") more delicate and slim. They are each about 2m tall, and the northern one of the pair seems to have a small ridge running around it. That may be significant, or maybe not -- the apparent pit in which the stone is located may just be an excavation artifice.
There is much discussion in the literature about whether these stones should be considered to be a pair, and whether they are connected in some way to the circle. Personally, I don't see any obvious connection apart from proximity.......
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So, what of any possible Stonehenge connection? Well, there is nothing here to suggest any connection with Stonehenge or any contact between the Preseli tribe and the people of Salisbury Plain. Parker Pearson and his colleagues argue for a deep connection between the peoples of the two widely separated areas -- but since they claim the existence of a highly sophisticated community at Rhosyfelin, Carn Goedog and Waun Mawn, capable of large scale quarrying and stone moving operations, we see none of that here at Gors Fawr, or for that matter at Foel Drygarn.
So we return to these questions: If the Late Neolithic tribesmen of Preseli had a special reverence for spotted dolerite monoliths, why did they not exclusively use spotted dolerites in this stone setting, given that such stones were readily available? If our heroes were -- as claimed by Parker Pearson -- obsessed (at Rhosyfelin and Carn Goedog) with hunting for solid, elongated pillars, why have they ignored such stone shapes at Gors Fawr and used small boulders instead?
We might explain this by reference to the Neolithic - Bronze Age time line. There are all sorts of uncertainties in the radiocarbon chronology, but it is broadly agreed that around 5,000 year ago the "megalithic mania" in Britain reached its peak with the construction of Stonehenge and other imposing stone circles in which big stones were used and in which there were many demonstrations of advanced stone working skills. Gors Fawr was probably built about 500 years later, during the Late Neolithic - Early Bronze Age transition, and it might be argued that it is small and simple not because its builders were primitive or "backward" but because there were changed cultural priorities. In other words, they might have known about Stonehenge and other grandiose schemes, but chose not to mimic them.
This argument falls down because cultural changes do not simply flow in one direction. If we are expected to believe that advanced quarrying techniques were used in Preseli around 5,500 years ago and that advanced stone haulage techniques were in use 500 years later, we would expect to find unequivocal evidence in the local area. As we know, such evidence does not exist. The claims made by Parker Pearson and his team do not survive detailed scrutiny.
And the fatal flaw in the development and promotion of the narrative is that there have been no control studies -- so it has never been demonstrated that the features described at the two "quarrying sites" are not widespread natural phenomena. Indeed, I have demonstrated over and again from my own field research that all of the so-called engineering features occur in many entirely natural Pembrokeshire inland and coastal exposures of sedimentary and igneous bedrock.
Two scenarios have been explored by the archaeologists. In the first, the tribesmen of Salisbury Plain learned about the "special" rocks (spotted dolerite and foliated rhyolite) to be found in specific places in Preseli, and headed west in some great "tomb raider" expedition, robbing 80 significant monoliths and transporting them back (either sooner or later) to their homeland -- ignoring or suppressing whatever local resistance there might have been. In the second (preferred) scenario the people of Preseli accepted the superiority of the Salisbury Plain people and then became involved in some great political unification movement. They travelled off to Stonehenge in a great folk migration, taking the spirits of their ancestors with them, embodied in their 80 sacred stones. These stones were then presented as tributes to the Stonehenge people, to be incorporated into their great stone monument. That in itself would demonstrate some great reverence for a sophisticated society located far away in the west.
This stirring narrative has been heavily promoted by MPP and the media for more than a decade now, but it falls flat because cultural dissemination or advancement does not simply travel in one direction. If, in scenario one, the tribesmen who went off to west Wales in search of sacred stones, there must already have been famous sacred megalithic sites there, using sacred stones and in highly revered locations. As we never tire of pointing out, no such sites are known to have existed. Were they all destroyed or dismantled and removed, as MPP has suggested? That would involve stretching credibility to quite absurd lengths.........
And if, in scenario 2, the people of the Preseli tribe hauled themselves off to Salisbury Plain voluntarily, carrying their 80 petrified ancestors with them, and leaving a landscape behind them that was devoid of any cultural markers, what evidence is there of a great hiatus? This is what Parker Pearson and others wanted to examine through pollen analyses and other forms of recent environmental change research -- which conclusively showed that there was no hiatus or depopulation at the time:
The only possible "sacred sites" that we have in the Preseli landscape, following the cromlech construction phase, are the standing stones and stone pairs. (There is only one stone row in the area -- at Parc y Meirw -- and that is not very convincing........) They are widely scattered, with no concentrations close to Rhosyfelin or Carn Goedog, and they were not made preferentially of spotted dolerite or foliated rhyolite. They were made, according to utilitarian principles, of whatever handy pillar-shaped rocks happened to be lying around in the neighbourhood at the time.
CONCLUSIONS
The Late Neolithic and Bronze Age people of Preseli, as far as we can see from the evidence on the ground, had little or no interest in grandiose civil engineering schemes, even at the time that Stonehenge was constructed. Around 5,000 years ago they knew nothing of "special stones" or vast architectural "statements". Later on, throughout the transition from stone to metal they had very limited technical skills, lived a simple life and knew nothing whatsoever about Stonehenge.
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PS
I've realised that in the above I have accepted -- rather naively -- that the dating of the Gors Fawr circle to the Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age is correct. On checking more closely, I find that the site has never been excavated -- so there are no associated artifacts, no radiocarbon dates, and no stratigraphic records. It has simply been assumed, in the literature, that this is a feature created relatively late in the history of megalithic Pembrokeshire, on the grounds that the circle is perfect and that the stones are regularly placed or carefully measured out. Well, as I point out above, the circle is not perfect and the stones are not regularly placed. Nor is there an alternating arrangement of spotted and non-spotted dolerites. And there really is nothing to suggest thatc the circle has anything to do with the two nearby standing stones. In other words, we have lots of assumptions but few hard facts.........
With regard to Britain's simple circles of small stones, it's all too easy to assume that if some of them are dated, they are all dated -- but we do NOT know that they are all contemporaneous, since it is quite possible that some parts of the country were more "advanced" or more "backward" than others. They might also have had different cultural preferences. How far might some of the assigned dates be removed from their real dates of origin? A hundred years? 500 years? A millennium?
Look what a tangle Parker Pearson and his colleagues got into at Rhosyfelin and Waun Mawn by cherry picking the dates from the portfolio that were convenient and ignoring those that did not slot easily into the ruling hypothesis......
Watch this space.......
Gors Fawr is a favourite place of mine. I always take some time to meditate on the Dreaming Stone and never fail to gain some inspiration.
ReplyDeleteA few summers ago I walked from Bedd Arthur down the mountain to Gors Fawr. From Gors Fawr it is almost due North. I was struck by the similarity between the two monuments. One is feminine, the other masculine, but the small stone arrangements are very much the same. In my idea they were not used for sitting upon but rather for sitting against. I imagine the men (and women) leaning their backs against the stones observing the movements of the heavens while seated on the ground.
The monuments are clearly connected by form and function. Perhaps they were conceived as one monument with one cultural purpose.
The easiest way to explore the walk is to park near Carreg Waldo and then it is a couple of kilometres in either direction. The Gors Fawr direction can be wet but this summer it should be very accessible.