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John Latham - Archaeologist
Emma Plunkett Dillon - Archaeologist
CARMARTHENSHIRE
The Dinefwr Project
The Dinefwr Project aims to improve access, restore the designed park and enhance nature conservation within one of the most remarkable and significant landscapes in Wales. Funded through the Heritage Lottery Fund, phase one included acquisition of Home Farm (part of the original park), emergency repairs, a conservation plan and a restoration plan. Surveys commissioned as part of the conservation plan have greatly increased our understanding of the evolution of the park and have produced dramatic discoveries.
Dinefwr Park is located in Carmarthenshire on the outskirts of Llandeilo. Owned by the Rice/Rhys family from the 15th century until broken up in the 1970s, it was sold piecemeal to the National Trust, the Wildlife Trust South and West Wales and various private individuals. Dinefwr Castle is a guardianship site managed by Cadw on behalf of the National Assembly of Wales. The conservation plan encompasses the entire park and includes the views of Cadw and the Wildlife Trust.
Stray finds suggesting high status Roman settlement in the eastern part of the park prompted the commissioning of a geophysical survey. This was undertaken by Stratascan on behalf of Gwilym Hughes, director of Cambria Archaeology who compiled the final report. The remarkable clarity of the results revealed two overlapping Roman forts with associated civilian settlement, roads and possible bath house.
A Roman fort in the vicinity of Llandeilo had long been expected as it is equidistant from Llandovery and Carmarthen, both of which also have forts, but the discovery of two sites was surprising. Only two other examples of super-imposed forts are known in Wales; at Cardiff and Neath. The dimensions of the larger and older fort are unknown but it could be as much as 3.9ha. The smaller, more recent and much clearer structure is some 1.54 ha in area. Within this fort it is possible to identify the via principalis and the via praetoria together with part of the via sagularis (intervallum road).
Roman forts in West Wales are generally thought to date to the 70s AD when the Flavian conquest finally prevailed. The later site may reflect a garrison phase following a short abandonment perhaps when military support was required further north. Alternatively the Dinefwr forts may represent an as yet unsuspected chapter in the history of the Roman conquest of Wales.
Phase two of the Dinefwr project includes a budget for further geophysical survey and trial trenching to confirm the character of the buried archaeology. On the basis of this an assessment will be made as to the most appropriate means of progressing our understanding of the significance of the site. Should any further work be undertaken it would be part of a separate funding initiative. It will be long term and will meet National Trust aims of inclusivity, life-long learning and community involvement.
A veteran tree survey carried out by Treeworks under the direction of Neville Fay identifies 295 ancient (pre-dating1600AD) trees located throughout the park Over 700 mature to late mature trees were also recorded. At the western end of the deer park is a population of ancient maiden oaks, some of which appear to be about 700 years old and, therefore, predate the creation of this enclosure.
They do not seem to have been managed in any traditional sense for over 400 years. Detailed mapping identified the isolated remnants of formal avenues shown in early eighteenth-century images of the park. It also picked out the clumps and stands of mature trees shown in these paintings still surviving amongst eighteenth-century planting.
The tree survey complemented and enhanced many of the other surveys. Comparison with the topographical survey of the deer park undertaken by Ken Murphy of Cambria Archaeology demonstrated that several of the old trees were aligned along barely visible earth banks. These represent pre-park field boundaries and tracks. Some of the latter may be associated with the castle and the long-vanished medieval settlement of Newton.
The removal of the track that enters the park in the north west corner to outside the walls is documented in seventeenth-century accounts. This survey also identified an Iron Age hill-fort hidden beneath seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century planting and obscured by the creation of an eighteenth-century pleasure ground.
The designed landscape survey undertaken by Hal Moggridge of Colvin and Moggridge described the creation of the landscape park and detailed the involvement of Capability Brown. George Rice and his wife Cecil removed fields and farms to the east of the house, removed farming activities to the periphery and clumped formal avenues. By merging the rugged outlines of the seventeenth-century deer park with the newly established naturalistic landscape they created a seamless whole, widely praised and recorded in both word and image.
With the help of the tree survey and the topographical survey it was possible to identify detailed planting patterns. Hal was able to show how the smooth outlines of plantations in the eastern ’beautiful’ part of the park were gradually modified to rough edges that matched the picturesque topography of the deer park. Clever planting framed views towards the house and castle and out into the wider landscape beyond. Formal avenues were partly removed and the remainder incorporated into clumps – two examples have ‘spines’ of equally spaced lime trees.
‘Capability’ Brown apparently put forward various improvements to the original design. Fieldwork and topographic survey suggest that a path providing a circular route around the park was set out according to his design. But many of his other recommendations were ignored, including the demolition of the walled garden beside the house and the construction of a pleasure ground beside the bath house in the deer park.
Additional works include building surveys of Home Farm and Pen parc, and also of individual structures within the park. An archaeological survey carried out by Sal Garfi identified and described 210 sites.
Phase two of the Dinefwr project aims to implement the policies set out in the conservation plan. As well as undertaking a restoration of the designed landscape and implementing measures to preserve and enhance the ecology of the park, remaining gaps in our understanding will be addressed. Further surveys will be undertaken, for example the eighteenth-century deer park wall, the eighteenth-century bath house and the isolated Llandyfeisant Church.
The designed landscape survey will be extended to include Castle Woods, part of the park, but owned by the Wildlife Trust. Opportunities to fund further topographical and geophysical survey will be sought with the aim of identifying the location of the two medieval towns, one English and one Welsh, once located within the park. Newton House will continue as the focus and will house new interpretation as well as serving as a location for community-based activities.
GWYNEDD
Egryn
This recent Trust acquisition is a narrow strip of land, three miles north of Barmouth, that runs from the beach right up to a height of 400m onto Mynydd Egryn itself. The whole property lies within an area designated in "The Register of Landscapes of Outstanding Historic Significance in Wales". Egryn or Egryn Abbey was bequeathed to the National Trust in the will of Rodney Bryne who died in 2000. Mr Bryne and his mother had a longstanding interest in the archaeology of the area and the architecture of their buildings.
They were especially keen to protect the many examples on their own land and sincerely believed the best way to ensure this was to leave their estate to the National Trust. They had worked with and encouraged many archaeologists and architectural historians over the years including the staff of Cadw and the RCAHMW who had many reasons for making frequent visits to Egryn. They had encouraged surveys and also some excavation.
What is most interesting about this property is the extraordinary variety and chronological range of its archaeological and historic interest. Significant examples of archaeology range from the earliest period - a pair of Neolithic long cairns (Carneddau Hengwm) - right up to a Second World War gun battery, cleverly disguised as a railwayman's hut.
The Neolithic
The earliest sites at Egryn are two quite splendid neolithic long cairns known as Carneddau Hengwm. These cairns were first described and drawn in the late eighteenth century by Thomas Pennant in his "Tours" and are conceivably the oldest sites in Trust ownership in Wales (to be correct only part of one of the cairns is on Trust land), dating to the beginning of the fourth millennia BC.
The north cairn is the more ruinous but has the remains of two side chambers. The south cairn is much larger, has retained one of its roofed side chambers and at its east a typical portal dolmen construction, (the ceremonial entrance to the tomb) which Pennant described as having two overlapping capstones. These stones are still there but have evidently been pushed off their supports since Pennant's visit in the 1780s.
The Bronze Age and later Prehistoric
A bit further up the hill from the long cairns is an area with various Bronze Age monuments. Typical of the period are the burial cairns and more notably a stone circle built with its stones set leaning out from the circle in a "sunburst" arrangement. OGS Crawford excavated this site and some of the cairns in 1919.
There is one other example of a similar stone circle north of Egryn at Bryn Cader Faner, but no others have survived. Since 1999 a small team from Bangor University has been excavating sites on Mynydd Egryn. Initially they were supported by Mr. Bryne but latterly by the Trust. During the last season of work (2003), they excavated what had appeared to be one of the many cairns but which could well be a Bronze Age house. The results of tests on datable material from this site are pending.
The Iron Age and Medieval
In "Snowdonia from the Air" (Crew & Musson, 1996) the Egryn prehistoric landscape features on several pages. The most striking illustration (p41) clearly shows the late Iron Age / early medieval landscape of fields, platform houses and paddocks which lies just above the Fridd boundary wall and extends over an area of about 30 ha. This area was surveyed in 1982 by Martin DeLewandowicz and subsequently has been protected by schedule.
Stone quarrying
The local stone of which almost all of the houses and boundary walls are built is a hard grey sandstone, the Rhinog Grits. However, some of the mullions, door embrasures and decorative mouldings of Harlech Castle, Cymmer Abbey (near Dolgellau) and also Egryn Abbey itself are constructed from sandstone of quite different character. This was quarried at Egryn.
A document relating to the building of Harlech Castle mentions payment for shipping stone from the 'free quarry at Egrin' (a freestone quarry). A timber trackway was exposed on the beach at Egryn in the 1970s and excavated soon after. This has been radiocarbon dated to the same period of historic building activity, and could well be linked.
Mining
Considerable evidence of manganese mining survives at Egryn, although the main source of magnesium in Wales is the much larger Rhiw and Benallt mine in Lleyn. Initially the source was exploited in the 1830s for oxide and it was later re-opened during the Second World War for use in the steel industry.
The Buildings
The farmstead at Egryn is dominated by a pair of buildings set parallel to each other. One is a late fifteenth-century hall house of the classic type, once open to the rafters with decorative roof trusses, floor to ceiling mouldings, cross passage and central hearth. Deeply unfashionable by the mid sixteenth century, it was converted into a storeyed house and a typical "Tudor" fireplace and chimney stack was added to one side. Further changes to the structure effectively destroyed both ends of the "hall" but the central part is intact.
The other building is a bit later (probably early seventeenth-century) but more or less unaltered. Known as the "old house" and wrongly thought to be the Refectory of the Abbey, it is a strange austere building, which has hardly any windows. Also within the farm-yard complex is a small-scale mill attached to the north corner of the "old house" and an unusually well-preserved field-barn 120m east south-east of this, possibly 18th-century in date. The Trust is currently awaiting the results of dendro-dating on some of the timbers from both the main dwellings on-site.
The Collection
Also left to the Trust by the donor is a vast and extraordinary collection of objects that are crammed into every barn and building as well as scattered outside. There is a major collection of old tractors these include vehicles by Field Marshall, Porsche, Allgaier, Fordson, Ursus etc.
References
Cadw, 1998. Register of Landscapes of Outstanding Historic Interest in Wales. Cardiff: Cadw, CCW and ICOMOS UK.
Carroll, John & Stuart, Garry, 2002. Tractors, London.
Crawford, O.G.S. 1920. An account of excavations at Hengwm, Merionethshire, August and September 1919. Archaeologia Cambrensis 6th Ser 20, 99-133.
Crew, Peter & Musson, Chris, 1996. Snowdonia from the Air. Snowdonia National Park & RCAHM (W).
De Lewandowicz, M. 1982. Egryn Abbey Landscape Survey. Unpublished BA Dissertation, University of Wales, Bangor.
Down, C.G., 1980. The Manganese Mines of North Wales, A Monograph of the Northern Mine Research Society.
Johnston, Robert & Roberts, John 2003. 'Ardudwy Early Landscapes Project Unpublished report on the 2003 excavation.
Palmer, Tim, 2003. 'Egryn Sandstone: A lost and rediscovered Welsh freestone' in Newsletter of the Welsh Stone Forum No. 1., 7-9 (October 2003).
Lynch, Frances, 1995. A Guide to Ancient and Historic Wales, Gwynedd. Cadw
Muckle, Peter & Latham, J.E., 2003. Archaeological Survey of Egryn, Meirionydd, Gwynedd. Unpublished Report for the National Trust.
Musson, C.R., Taylor, J.A., & Heyworth, A. 1989. 'Peat Deposits and a Medieval Trackway at Llanaber, near Barmouth, Gwynedd', Archaeology in Wales, 29, 22-26., 1989.
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