Pen y Crug

Most good hillforts require a drive and a serious walk. Pen y Crug is a mile and a half from the middle of Brecon and you can be on top of it in an hour from the town car park.

What is there

A roughly oval enclosure on a hill above the Honddu, defended by four ramparts and ditches on most sides, with entrances at the north-east and south-west.

Multivallate is the technical word — multiple ramparts — and it usually indicates either a long sequence of rebuilding or a community with the labour to spare and something to say about it. The banks are grassed over and the ditches partly silted, but the profile is legible all the way round and you can walk the circuit.

The interior is open grassland with no visible internal features, which is normal. Hut platforms in a fort like this are usually only detectable by geophysics or in the right light.

The position

This is the reason to go up.

From the top the whole of the middle Usk valley is laid out: Brecon below, the Usk running east, the Honddu coming down from the north, and Pen y Fan and the central Beacons filling the southern horizon.

Two and a half miles west is Y Gaer, the Roman cavalry fort of about AD 75. Below is Brecon itself, with its Norman castle at the confluence and a priory that became a cathedral in 1923.

Three sets of people chose ground within a few miles of each other, across two thousand years, for the same reasons — the rivers, the routes and the defensible ground — and from Pen y Crug you can see all three at once.

That is worth more than any amount of reading about Iron Age settlement patterns.

Dating

The fort is conventionally assigned to the Iron Age, broadly the last few centuries BC.

Visiting

Free, open access, on common land. From Brecon take the lane north past the Cerrigcochion road, or follow the waymarked route from the town.

It is steep near the top and exposed. There is no interpretation on site.

Brecknock Museum in Brecon holds material from Y Gaer and provides the context.