Day 2. Saturday morning and I set off late to head for south Wales. The first part of my trip was to be on the Gower Peninsula, the small area to the south-west of Swansea. The first site on my list: Parc le Breos (SS 537 898) (see fig. 6).
This may seem to those more familiar with Irish monuments to be a court tomb, but it is in fact a Severn/Cotswold long barrow. There are many similarities between these two types of monument and I suspect quite a strong link existed between the builders.
The 5m long gallery is preceded by a narrow entrance way similar to a court. There are two sub-chambers at the rear of the central passage, which form a T-shape plan. The cairn is trapezoidal and aligned east-west with the entrance at the west. I parked at the old mill at the end of the lane and walked the 800m to reach the site, but it is possible to drive up the track and park a lot closer.
The setting of the tomb is quite unusual being in a small valley the sides of which are wooded with deciduous trees - very sinilar to how it must have looked when the monument was in use.
Just 1km or so down the road, now embedded into sand dunes are the scant remains of another tomb at Pen Maen. Here just a few wall slabs poke through the sand, partially covered by a displced capstone (see fig. 7).
Next on the visit list was Maen Cetti (SS 492 906), another Welsh tomb that goes by the name Arthur's Stone. The sheer bulk of the split-boulder capstone, supported on such tiny 'legs' (see fig. 8) reminds me of Kiltiernan Domain (County Dublin). It's difficult to say if this falls into the portal tomb classification or not. The main structure certainly does, but its position (on the false crown of a ridge) and the traces of a huge round cairn it appears to have been set in makes it an odd one. The plain below is studded with standing stones and this tomb and the cairns nearby seem to be built to be seen from these monuments. Several other large slabs lie around its base in the hollow at the centre of the cairn spread seem to have no place in the main structure. A truly interesting tomb with great views.
Forgive me for this but the next site, Samson's Jack or Erection (SS 476 921) is a mighty fine standing stone (see fig. 9). It is a conglomerate studded with small speckles of white quartz and a few veins of rose quartz running through it. It towers to a massive, pointy 5m tall. Most impressive.
I would have loved to have enough time to see more of the standing stones in the area, but I had two sites to visit while I was in south Wales and these are over an hours drive away near to Cardiff. This meant driving past Port Talbot, where the UK's last surviving steel works looms and belches smoke and filth and looks like hell on earth when it first comes into view.
