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This is a great thread, thanks for posting it! Last spring I took a vacation to Wales and for a good part of the trip I was up in the north wandering around checking out various iron age ruins and megaliths, IMO anyone who is interested in this mythology should really visit that area if you get a chance, it's an incredible place and you can really feel the setting in the Arthurian stories and stuff like the Mabinogion come alive. Most of the actual castles and towns from the dark ages are just lumps of earth at this point (the actual standing castles that still dot the Welsh landscape are mostly from much later when Edward I conquered the country) but some of the actual religious monuments are in a bit better shape and going around trying to find them is a lot of fun - most of them aren't designated tourist sites or anything they are just in random farmer's fields but they do have little plaques here and there explaining what archeologists think the places were used for. Some of the sites are relevant specifically to the Arthurian legends (for example in the mountains of Snowdonia there's the ruins of an old hill fort called Dinas Emrys which some people theorize is the setting of the story where Vortigern kept trying to build a tower and it kept sinking due to red and white dragon infestation). A lot of the other ruins are the remains of villages and forts from the period, or of structures thought to be of religious import, but in many cases very little is known about them. For example this was thought to be a ~5th century druidic shrine of some sort:  It was hard to get a picture showing the definition of the "structure" but in some spots you could see stones peeking out from under the grass. I believe this area was excavated in the 19th century which is when they did the work on determining it's usage, and it has since grown back over. This is out in the middle of a pasture in the middle of nowhere with a tiny little wooden sign on a fence mentioning it and the theoretical usage. A lot of the sites in this area are like this, presumably having not really been studied up close in over a hundred years and I wonder what more there is to learn from them. Probably quite a lot. Nearby (and I think lending creedence to the shrine theory) were these beautiful standing stones.  a close shot showing the scale. my girlfriend is about 5'6" so these stones were a good 12-13 feet high or so, and who knows how deep into the ground they go  It was a lot of fun hiking around for hours with a paper map (there's no cell reception out there) trying to find these things while ten thousand sheep are constantly staring at you and wondering what the gently caress you are doing in their field. I hope there's a way to find out more about this period and these people from these sorts of ruins though it's hard to think of how it could be done without causing a lot of disturbance to the farmers who's land these are all on, though they are happy enough to let people wander around in their pastures looking for these things. There are also a few sites which after their discovery were made into public land so you can see some of the actual original walls. For example this is the ruins of a place called Llys Rhosyr, which is from much later than the above images (and the Arthurian period) and thought to be the remains of one of the last native Welsh castles probably from the 11th or 12th century and most likely destroyed by Edward's forces in the 13th century. This was not a "military castle" in the sense that they came to be used but rather a sort of lightly fortified administrative centre for the region. 
Earwicker fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Mar 28, 2014 |
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Mar 28, 2014 17:16
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:How many sites like that are there? Is it worth planning a big trip? It seems like they're a lot more approachable than Stonehenge and similarly sized. There are quite a lot of them, but most are rather small. Here's a map of the known ones in the area where I was: http://www.megalithic.co.uk/asb_mapsquare.php?op=map&sq=SH&co=&condition=0&ambience=0&access=0&sitetype=0&order=m_stname&tl=1 If you scroll down you can see pictures of a lot of the sites. Some are fairly big but none that I saw really approached the size of Stonehenge. But it's a very different experience, most of them aren't major tourist attractions and don't have parking lots or fencing and you rarely encounter anyone else out there, and the process of hiking around the countryside trying to find them is a lot of fun.
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Mar 29, 2014 23:08
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