The Black Mountains Chambered Tombs

The northern edge of the Black Mountains, round Talgarth and Crickhowell, holds one of the denser concentrations of Neolithic chambered tombs in Wales.

They belong to the Cotswold-Severn tradition — trapezoidal long cairns with stone chambers set into them, built from around 3800 BC — and their distribution stops at the mountains. This is the western edge of a monument type whose heartland is the Cotswolds and the Severn valley, which tells you where the people who built them were looking.

Gwernvale

On the western edge of Crickhowell, in the grounds of what is now a hotel, and excavated in 1977 and 1978 ahead of a road scheme.

The excavation was thorough and the report is a standard reference. What it established was that the cairn was built over an earlier Mesolithic and early Neolithic occupation site — people had been living on that spot for a long time before anyone decided to build a monument on it.

That is a pattern found elsewhere and it matters. These tombs were not placed at random on empty ground; they were placed where people already were, or had been.

Penywyrlod

Above Talgarth, and excavated in 1972 after being partly destroyed by quarrying for road stone.

It produced human remains from several individuals and is one of the better-dated monuments of the group. As at Gwernvale, the rescue circumstances are the reason it was dug at all.

Ty Illtud

Above Llanhamlach, east of Brecon, and the most interesting of the group for reasons that have nothing to do with the Neolithic.

The chamber is small and accessible, and its stones carry a considerable quantity of carved graffiti — crosses, initials, names and dates — cut by visitors in the medieval and post-medieval periods.

The monument is named for St Illtud, and the graffiti has been read as evidence that it was used as a hermitage or a place of Christian devotion.

Either way it is a rare thing: a prehistoric monument with a documented history of people visiting it because they knew it was old, five hundred years or more before archaeology existed.

What they were for

Communal burial, over long periods, with remains added, rearranged and sometimes removed. These are not single graves. They are more like ossuaries that stayed in use for generations, and the human remains in them are usually disarticulated and mixed.

They are also territorial statements — permanent, visible, requiring substantial organised labour, placed in good farming country at the foot of the hills.

Visiting

Gwernvale is in hotel grounds and visible with permission. Ty Illtud and Penywyrlod are on private or common land; check access locally and treat all of them as scheduled monuments, which they are.

Do not dig, detect or move stones. The finds from Gwernvale and Penywyrlod are held by Amgueddfa Cymru and Brecknock Museum.