Welsh History: Strange but True

This book is dedicated to all the people of Wales.

Without their unwavering commitment

to oddness and peculiarity,

this book would never have been written.

Contents

Title

Dedication

Preface

Welsh History: Strange but True

Bibliography

Copyright

Preface

There is a story which may not be true. It might only be an urban myth, which would be a great shame because it deserves to be a true slice of life. It tells of a man – in some versions it is the actor Anthony Hopkins – who takes a cab in New York.

‘Where are you from?’ asks the driver.

‘Wales.’

‘And Wales is what exactly? A big fish, Diana’s husband or them singing bastards?’

A tough choice, I think. But what this book intends to show is that the Welsh are not all singing bastards.

Some are a whole lot worse.

c. 230,000 BC Pontnewydd Cave, Denbighshire

On Tour

Neanderthal remains have been found in Pontnewydd Cave in Denbighshire, near St Asaph. They were dated in 1981 and were confirmed as being about 230,000 years old – the oldest remains ever uncovered in Wales. A total of nineteen teeth were found, coming from five different individuals, both children and adults. One piece of jawbone holding a milk tooth and a permanent molar are believed to have come from an 11-year-old boy. There were also some stone tools and animal bones in the cave.

The teeth could, of course, be all that is left of an ancient burial site, scoured in the intervening millennia by retreating ice sheets. They had been there an awfully long time. Alternatively, it was the site of an early dental clinic.

Neanderthals are a particular branch of the evolutionary tree – and one of nature’s less attractive experiments. We shared a common ancestor with them but did not evolve from them. They had sloping foreheads, large brow ridges, big square jaws, short limbs, and they were pug-ugly. They were hunters who needed to get close to their prey in order to catch them, since they do not appear to have developed the use of weapons. They must have attacked in packs, showing a level of co-operation and planning. Other remains found elsewhere show signs that their hunting style left some of them with broken limbs. They did, however, use simple stone tools to butcher their meat.

A stone hand axe found in Rhosili was made by a Neanderthal craftsman about 100,000 years ago.

The earliest inhabitants of Cardiff left behind the Pen-y-Lan hand axe, dating from 75,000 BC.

The hardest and most time-consuming part of making an axe head was boring a hole all the way through the stone or flint for a handle, using only wood, stone and sand.

In 2006 a professor from Oxford University suggested that bachelor twins from Strata Florida were the last carriers of the Neanderthal bloodline. Every year children from Tregaron School were taken up to meet them as part of their study of evolution. Sadly the twins left no photographs.

All this evidence points inevitably to one conclusion. Teeth scattered everywhere? Broken limbs? Close-proximity fighting? A distinctive evolutionary branch? The Neanderthal party that left their teeth in Pontnewydd were nothing more complicated than a rugby team on tour who were looking for the local sport injuries clinic.

c. 27,000 BC Paviland, Gower

The Red Lady of Paviland

Let’s get one thing straight before we start. The Red Lady of Paviland was no lady. She was a man.

Bones, believed to be those of elephants, had been found in December 1822. The discovery brought William Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford University, to the site in Goat’s Hole in January 1823 and he unearthed the remains of an incomplete skeleton, stained red. The bones were from the right side of the body. The other bones that must have been there were probably disturbed by the action of the sea over the centuries. The area around the body, along with the bones themselves, was stained red. So were the items buried with the body – mammoth ivory bracelet fragments and perforated periwinkle shells. There were also small limestone blocks that may have been placed at the head and feet. Perhaps the skull of a mammoth found nearby may have also been part of the burial ritual. Sadly the skull has since been lost.

When Buckland published his findings later in the year he had decided that the ochre-stained skeleton was a ‘painted lady’ who entertained the Roman soldiers garrisoned in the camp on the hill above the cave. Alternatively, she could have been a witch.

The problem was Buckland was entirely wrong: the burial was male, and the mammoth products were original and Palaeolithic and not manufactured in some way at a later date as decorations. The camp was Iron Age, not Roman.

We now believe that the Red Lady was a ceremonial Palaeolithic burial dating from about 27,000 BC. The Red Lady was a healthy young adult male, aged between 25 and 30, about 5ft 6in tall and weighing about 11 stones. The head of the Red Lady has never been found, though it may have been removed as part of a burial ritual. There are other examples of this in similar graves from the period.

The find, though, was enormously significant. The Red Lady was the first human fossil found anywhere in the world – and is still the oldest ceremonial burial uncovered in Western Europe.

William Buckland found it very hard to date his prehistoric find in Paviland with any accuracy. He refused to believe that anything could pre-date the notional date of Noah and the Great Flood.

c. 12,000 BC Llandudno

Mr Kendrick’s Mandible

Thomas Kendrick had been employed in the local copper mines in Llandudno as a stonemason, but by 1880 he had retired and was working as a lapidary, making cheap jewellery from seaside pebbles. Even in the nineteenth century the idea of taking home meaningless souvenirs from the seaside was well established, and Mr Kendrick was eager to do whatever he could to relieve tourists of their unwanted cash.

He was working in his garden at his house Ardwy Orme on the Great Orme, clearing a small natural cave in order to extend his workshop. The cave was about 50ft deep and 16ft wide. Whilst the view from his garden of the promenade below him was impressive, it would soon pale into insignificance in comparison with what he discovered in the cave. Because he uncovered a significant treasure of prehistoric art, including a decorated horse jaw with three remaining incisor teeth, the oldest piece of portable art from Wales ever discovered.

The cave was probably a burial site. There were flint artefacts, animal teeth which had been pierced to use as jewellery, eight types of mollusc and human bones from three adults and a teenager. They had been nomadic hunters, probably from mainland Europe. The objects buried with them appear to have been coloured with ochre, just like those from Paviland. The find dated from about 12,000 BC. The jaw was decorated with zigzag lines and disappeared for a long time, until it was delivered to the British Museum in 1959.

Further discoveries were made in the twentieth century when the cave was excavated again, but the fear has always been that other objects were lost in earlier times. In this way the contents of the cave always give a tantalising – and frustrating – hint of the treasures that once might have been there.

The outline of a reindeer carved into the wall of Cathole Cave in Gower is the oldest piece of rock art found so far in Britain, possibly in North Western Europe at 14,000 years old. It was etched with a flint by an artist using their right hand.

Bacon Cave in Gower was named because of the ten red-coloured bands that initially were identified as examples of Palaeolithic art. It was not, however, the artist’s homage to a packet of streaky. It was merely red oxide mineral seeping through the rock.

At Penywyrlod near Talgarth in Powys the perforated leg bone of a sheep was found, dating from about 3650 BC. Holes appear to have been deliberately cut to make a whistle. Of course, the holes could have been made by gnawing animals, but it is nice to think that Welsh musical heritage has such a long history.

A woman’s body was excavated at Llandegai in Anglesey dating from before 2000 BC which had been buried in a bag of animal skin.

In 1833, workmen dug a hole beside the Chester to Mold Road (nowadays known as the A541). They found part of a skeleton and the largest single gold item ever found in Britain – the Mold Cape, dating from about 1900 BC. It was a single sheet of beaten gold, decorated with amber beads and made to cover the shoulders and upper body.

The Presaddfed Burial Chamber at Bodedern in Anglesey is said to have been used as a home by a family in the eighteenth century.

At Brenig in Denbighshire, a Bronze Age child aged around 6 months was found cremated and buried in an urn.

One single charred pea, found in excavations in Church Street, Carmarthen, is the only evidence of a legume anywhere in South West Wales.

A mattock made from an antler from a red deer was found in 1992, lying on the clay in front of the Uskmouth power station. It had been used for digging, possibly in the search for cockles. It was found close to human footprints, preserved in the silt which is exposed at low tide. Three trails of prints dating from 4000 BC were recorded. Two were those of adult males, shoe sizes 8 and 9. The third trail belonged to a child. Footprints have also been found at Magor Pill and Goldcliff.

c. 2600 BC Hindwell, Radnorshire

Wood You Believe It?

There is a faint but remarkable outline on the land in Radnorshire. At Hindwell there is the shadow of an enormous wooden enclosure, built between 2700 and 2500 BC. It is so old that not even the Romans would have known it was ever there. It had long gone by the time they arrived. Only modern aerial photography revealed its presence in 1992. And yet no one really knows what it was for.

The enclosure was oval shaped and formed by timber posts to create some kind of enormous stockade. The scale is staggering. There were 1,400 posts, each nearly 2ft in diameter and probably 20ft tall. The circumference is just about 2.5km and it enclosed a space of 34 hectares, the area of 55 football pitches, apparently. If the gaps between the carefully spaced posts had been filled with timber, as they probably were, then they would have used an additional 12,000 tons of wood.

Whatever Stonehenge might be – a burial site, a temple for sun worship, a healing centre, a huge calendar – the bluestones towards the centre of the monument appear to have come from the Presceli Hills in Pembrokeshire. How and why they were transported to Wiltshire remains unclear. There is evidence of cattle being driven from Wales to Wiltshire. Perhaps cattle were used to haul the bluestones for Stonehenge from Presceli.

Rhondda has its own ‘Stonehenge’ – Mynydd y Gelli, an arrangement of scattered stones in a rough circle. It is next to a landfill site.

It would have taken a long time to build and used up a vast amount of the local resources. Estimates suggest that 23 hectares of woodland would have had to be felled. The easiest way would have been to build a fire around the base of the trees and burn them through. But they would still have had to remove side branches and trim them, all with stone axes. The Hindwell enclosure would have taken over three years to build. There were pits to dig for the posts, which would have to be dragged into position (perhaps by cattle) and then carefully planted. It would have taken huge dedication to construct something on this scale, which would dwarf anything any of the people would ever have seen before. It had a narrow entrance 2m wide, which might suggest that it was built to facilitate entry in ceremonial procession. But its purpose remains a mystery.

The whole area is crawling with prehistoric remains. It always had a strategic importance, lying between the hills of Central Wales and the English Midlands, something which the Romans acknowledged by building a fortress there themselves. But they would not have seen Hindwell. Even if it survived intact for 200 years – which is unlikely – it had disappeared over 2,000 years before they turned up.

c. 2500 BC Barclodiad y Gawres, Anglesey

‘Fire Burn and Cauldron Bubble’

There is a Neolithic burial chamber on the southern coast of Anglesey, in a beautiful setting on Mynydd Cnwc, overlooking Porth Trecastell. Called Barclodiad y Gawres, it is an example of a cruciform passage grave and is noted for its decorated stones. It is very similar to graves across the sea in Ireland and the decorative patterns are like those found in Llandudno.

The site was built at about the same time as the Pyramids, though to a more modest design. It was excavated in 1952 and rebuilt to resemble its original layout, protected now by a large concrete dome. The excavations revealed two cremated young males in one of the side rooms. In the central part of the tomb there were the remains of a fire, on to which had been poured a stew as some kind of offering or magical potion. The recipe appears to have come straight from the witches’ cookbook as used in Macbeth. The ingredients? Wrasse, eel, frog, toad, grass snake, mouse, shrew and hare. It was then covered with limpet shells and pebbles. If it wasn’t an offering, then perhaps it was a warming winter casserole that went horribly wrong. Perhaps it needed a touch more garlic.

The more prosaic explanation is that this infernal stew is in fact the remains of an otter’s toilet – he’d moved in for a while – but let’s not let historical accuracy snatch away all our dreams.

The name of the burial chamber translates as ‘Apronful of the Giantess’ and to be honest, whatever this pile of inedible refuse might once have been, you certainly wouldn’t want it in your apron.

The first pieces of jewellery found in Wales were perforated sea shells and strings of stone beads.

Possessions were few, and valuable. Perhaps this is why the Welsh didn’t often bury their dead with objects from everyday life.

In 2012, remains of a wooden structure were found outside Monmouth, which may have been a Neolithic longhouse or hall.

1700 BC Llandudno

Earth, Water, Fire and Air

Mining in Wales is not a modern phenomenon at all. It has a very long history. In the nineteenth century, when Welsh copper strengthened the hulls of British warships and produced the currency that lubricated the slave trade, miners discovered that they were not the first men beneath the ground. Miners on the Great Orme frequently uncovered old tunnels containing bone tools. Some of the tunnels they found were so small that they could only have been worked by children – minors as miners. Their tools came from cattle. Ribs and legs provided picks and shoulder blades were used as shovels. In fact at least 33,000 digging bones have been found there.

Modern scientific techniques have shown that the mines had been worked for thousands of years. By about 1700 BC the copper ore mines on the Great Orme on the North Wales coast together formed the largest mine in Europe. It began as an open-cast operation which removed about 28,000 tons of rock in pursuit of the copper ore. Soon they followed the seams underground, digging tunnels with bone tools. Fires would be burnt against the rock surface to weaken it and in doing so created horrible working conditions.

The ore had to be separated from the rock. Much was sorted by hand and then washed to remove limestone. The temperatures required to smelt the recovered copper ore were achieved by using hand bellows and charcoal which put great strain on local woodland resources.