Cilmeri

Three miles west of Builth Wells, on the Llanwrtyd road, there is a rough block of granite on a mound beside a layby. It is easy to drive past and a great many people do.

What happened

On 11 December 1282 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd was in this district with a small force, separated from the main body of his army. He was caught by English troops and killed.

The circumstances are argued about in the detail and clear in outline. He had left his army, apparently to meet somebody; he was in open country; and he was killed by a soldier who, by most accounts, did not know who he was until afterwards.

His head was taken to London and displayed. His body, by tradition, went to the Cistercians at Abbeycwmhir.

What it meant

It ended the independent principality. Llywelyn had been recognised as Prince of Wales by Henry III at Montgomery in 1267, with the homage of the other Welsh lords owed to him; fifteen years later that arrangement was finished, and Edward I's settlement of 1284 replaced it with English administration.

Welsh poetry registered it immediately and in terms that have not really been matched since. Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch's elegy asks why the sea does not cover the land, and it is still one of the most quoted poems in the language.

The monument

The stone was set up in 1956 by public subscription, replacing an earlier and much resented arrangement in which the site was marked by a Wellingtonia planted by an English landowner.

It is deliberately plain: unworked granite from Gwynedd, with an inscription and a slate plaque. No statue, no figure, no allegory.

People leave flowers, particularly around 11 December, when there is an annual commemoration. It is one of very few places in Wales that functions as a genuine site of national memory rather than as a visitor attraction, and it has done so continuously for seventy years.

The traditions

Local tradition holds that Llywelyn sheltered in a cave at Aberedw in his last days, that the smith who shod his horse reversed the shoes to disguise the tracks and was hanged for it, and that the townspeople of Builth refused him entry — hence bradwyr Buallt, the traitors of Builth.

Visiting

Free, open, beside the road, with a layby and no facilities. There is a pub nearby and a station on the Heart of Wales line.

It takes five minutes. Go anyway. Builth Castle's earthworks are three miles east and Abbeycwmhir, where the body is said to lie, is around twenty miles north.