Two walks coming up...

I'm leading two walks this coming Bank Holiday weekend -- one on Saturday, starting and finishing at Bedd Morris standing stone, for the PLANED Preseli Walking Festival, and then another on Bank Holiday Monday, 30th May.  That will be one of my normal "Literary Walks" on Carningli, taking in some of the key locations in the Angel Mountain stories.  I enjoy these walks, especially if I have a group of maybe 6 or 8 people.  More than that, and I have to deal with a crowd, and less that that, things feel a bit thin.  That having been said, it has happened, more than once, that the weather is so bad that nobody turns up at all, apart from me.  In that case, I go for the all all on my own, enjoying the solitude on the mountain when it is in one of its darker moods.....

Cnapan returns to Big Beach

Tomorrow at around 6 pm there will be a "game" of cnapan on Traeth mawr (Big Beach) in Newport -- staged with the help of around 60 rugby players for a TV documentary featurung Griff Rhys Jones.  Griff is following the old pilgrim trail from Aberystwyth to St David's, and is hopping off to look at assorted quirky things along the way.  he and the TV producer were quite kaken with the idea that cnapan used to be played on the beach -- so Pete and Ursula Smith have done their best to rustle up a goodly number of beefy individuals to have a go at the game on the sand.  We'll try to make the game as authentic as possible -- but I dare say the players will not be too well up on the tactical niceties of the game.

The last time that the game was played on the sands was in the 1990's -- for an S4C programme.  before that, we played the game for a decade of so around 1985 - 1995, for an annual "Cnapan Trophy" -- with teams from the parishes of Newport and Nevern competing.

Why is this relevant to angel Mountain?  Well, the game features quite prominently in the stories, and of course one of the great tragedies of the saga -- the death of Martha's husband David -- occurs in the middle of a cnapan game on Traeth Mawr.

The Mynydd Melyn settlement

I had a pleasant walk yesterday from Bedd Morris to Pengwndwn, up towards Carn Enoch, and then back via Mynydd Melyn.  It's just a gentle summit but there's a lot of rough ground around it, and lost among the gorse bushes there are several ring cairns / roundhouses / circular enclosures.  They are rather like those near Carn Edward, but one is very strange, seemingly divided into segments.  Must go and examine it again in more detail..... but in the meantime I'll speculate that these features belong to a small Mynydd Melyn Community, probably dating from the Bronze Age, and confirming yet again that there was quite a sizeable population (several hundred people?) living in a number of distinct clusters on the upland ridge of Carningli and Dinas Mountain.

Another burial site on Carningli?

This is a boulder I have often walked past before, on the south side of the mountain and not far from Carningli Lodge.  It's easy to find because it's on the slope beneath a prominent holly tree.   I was walking past it again yesterday when I noticed that it has a slight ridge made of smaller stones running round it.  The ridge is about 3m across.  It's most obvious on the downslope side, and of course it's invisible at the height of summer when the bracken is high.  There is a substantial cavity beneath the boulder, and although it appears to be in its "natural" position it might have been levered up and then partly supported on smaller stones.  Could it have held the cremated remains of one or more local inhabitants?  It reminds me of some of the other "sub-megalithic" burial chambers in Pembrokeshire -- and of the simple burial sites in the Garn Wen "cemetery" above Goodwick.  These are sometimes called "earthfast" chambered tombs -- very different from the hugely impressive  Pentre Ifan or Carreg Samson near Mathry which are dated to the Neolithic.  These are classic megalithic sites.

As I understand it, these "lazy" tombs (made with a minimum of effort and ceremonial) date from some time after the "high point" of Neolithic tomb building, when traditions were changing.  So could this feature date from the Neolithic / Bronze age transition, and could it be associated with the relics of round houses and other features found both on this side of Carningli and on the Newport side?

Captured on film.....

There I was, sitting in the sun on top of the mountain, chomping on my breakfast sandwich and looking down on a world that was just waking up, and all of a sudden along comes this hulking great military transport plane (a Hercules?) flying very low, and following the Gwaun Valley.  Is there nowhere peaceful left in this world?

On hearing the first cuckoo

Yes, the cuckoo was there when I went up the mountain this morning, and enjoyed breakfast on the summit.  It was a perfect spring morning -- just a gentle breeze, and hazy sunshine.  High tide in the estuary too.  A seagull chased the male hen harrier across the southern flank of the mountain -- very aggressive it was.  A pair of rather agitated ravens -- they must have a nest not far away.  Skylarks up above, as ever.

Strange that one sets such store by the first hearing of the cuckoo in spring.  Are we taught to think that this is really the first sign of spring?  Or is it something instinctive?  Status is involved too -- one always feels a glow of pride, when talking to others, if one has heard the first cuckoo before they have.  On the other hand  one feels a tinge of disappointment when somebody says:  "Oh,  I heard the cuckoo three days ago!"

Strange to have such romantic feelings about a bird that is a parasite and a seriously nasty piece of work.....

Mistress Martha's Tenth Anniversary

Probably I'm the only one to have noticed it, but this year is the tenth anniversary of the publication of the first Angel Mountain book, with the cover as above.  That cover should now be worth a fortune, with the subtitle "A Pembrokeshire Tale".  At that time (in 2001) I had no idea that the single book would turn into a Saga -- and later editions had different subtitles on them.

So ten years ago, in March, I was still hard at work writing the first episode in the exciting life story of Mistress Martha.  The time has just flown by!  And now, seven volumes and about a million words later,  I still haven't finished with Martha.  Seven is such an awkward number, don't you think?  Eight has a much nicer ring to it.