Maen Llia and the Fforest Fawr Stones

The road from Sennybridge over to Ystradfellte climbs through an empty pass between Fan Nedd and Fan Llia, and near the top there is a stone standing on its own in the grass.

Maen Llia is a slab of old red sandstone over three metres high and broad in one direction, thin in the other. It is Bronze Age, it is one of the largest standing stones in south Wales, and there is nothing else within sight.

What it is doing there

Nobody knows, and anyone who tells you otherwise is guessing.

Standing stones of this period have been read as territorial markers, route markers, meeting points, burial markers, and monuments in senses we have no word for. Several of those may be true of the same stone.

What can be said about Maen Llia specifically is that it sits in a pass — a natural crossing point between the Senni and Mellte valleys — and that it is placed to be seen from a distance in both directions. That is at least consistent with marking a route or a boundary.

Local tradition holds that the stone goes down to the river to drink on Midsummer morning.

Maen Madoc

Four miles south, beside the Roman road generally called Sarn Helen where it crosses the moor above Ystradfellte, is a different kind of stone.

Maen Madoc is around 2.7 metres high and carries a Latin inscription of the fifth or sixth century commemorating a man named Dervacus, son of Justus. It stands beside a Roman road, in a Roman lettering tradition, several generations after Rome had gone.

That combination is the whole of post-Roman Wales in one object: an old road still in use, an old alphabet still understood, and a society that was no longer part of an empire and had not stopped behaving as though the empire's forms mattered.

The wider moor

Fforest Fawr carries Bronze Age cairns along its ridges in numbers, mostly unmarked and unsignposted. Some are large and obvious; a great many are low piles of stone that look like nothing until you have seen a few.

The concentration on the high ground is the usual bias: monuments survive where the plough never reached. The settlements these people lived in were almost certainly on lower ground and have gone.

Visiting

Maen Llia is a few minutes' walk from a layby on the mountain road between Heol Senni and Ystradfellte. It is on open access land.

Maen Madoc requires a walk of a mile or so from the road above Ystradfellte, along the Roman road alignment.

Both are scheduled monuments. The road over the pass is narrow, steep and exposed, and it is regularly closed in winter.