Bryn Cader Faner: Some Thoughts

The weather has finally improved over North Wales, getting us all out into the open after another lengthy period of winter-enforced indoor-ism.

That said, when I turned up in the northern Rhinogau the other day, I was mightily annoyed to find an easterly wind roaring over the ridges of said mountains!  It would be 3 hours of waiting around before the wind abated enough to get the drone up.

Time hanging around, of course, can be useful, as we'll see.

I made my way along the beautiful sandstone landscape, walking against an incredibly strong and desiccatingly-dry wind. Eventually, I caught sight of what I'd come to see: the iconic Bronze Age funerary cairn at Bryn Cader Faner.

Bryn Cader Faner, as it appears some distance along the trackway to the south-west. It would also have skylined, probably more so, had it been positioned on the flat ground behind and to the left.

 

This is a very remote but very highly-photographed monument, some 10m in diameter. Surprisingly, I can find no real academic work about it. The Army certainly took notice of it during WW2, shooting the site up and damaging it badly. Earlier, during the 19th century, treasure hunters dismantled the cist burial lying at the monument's centre, leaving it with a prominent depression.

As far as I'm aware, the Army has never done anything to compensate for this loutish behaviour so characteristic of Imperial English attitudes of the time.

Descriptions of the monument are confused about how many recumbent stones lie around the perimeter. Some say 15, others 18. I counted 24. It's possible that stones have been added in more recent times in an effort to 'repair' it. In some ways, that's a bit misguided. Yet in another sense, it's a nice part of its continuing presence and relevance.

The spectacular Bryn Cader Faner Bronze Age monument, viewed from the SW.

 

Waiting around, I had a walk to one of many steps in the sandstone landscape, a sign of endless layers of sedimentation laid down over millions of years. The rock here dips downwards towards the north-west, but the sandstone strata themselves are arranged and slope on a SW-NE line. I had a look around for any fossilised ripples from ancient beaches, but couldn't see any.

What I could see, looking back towards the monument 'from the side', was clear confirmation of what is immediately apparent as you reach it: it's not positioned at the highest point of the local landscape, which also happens to be the most horizontally-level (as opposed to sloping-but-level) ground here. 

The positioning is on ground that mirrors the line of the sandstone strata, which is very clear in the photo I took, seen below:

 

The monument could have been set on horizontally-flat ground at the very top of the hill. Instead, it was positioned on and reflecting the sandstone strata slopes.

The only official words I've come across that comment upon the monument's location is that it is "probably deliberately set to skyline when approached along the ancient trackway to the south". This may be correct; I'm not sure. It would have been much more prominently visible, if that were the aim, and would have skylined from more directions, had it been placed on the horizontally-flat ground just a few metres beyond. 

Bryn Cader Faner is notably not installed on the very summit of the local ground, which is also, as can be seen at upper centre left, an otherwise useful piece of flat ground.

Was there a reason why the very convenient-to-build-on, flat ground wasn't utilised for the monument? Maybe it was used for something else?  Perhaps a now lost monument?  It seems unlikely, but then there is another ring of stones, 20m in diameter, and as far as I know, and remarkably, only formally recorded in 2019 yet is quite obvious to the careful observer,  935m to the SW (a line of 220 degrees true as viewed from Bryn Cader Faner).

What is clear from visiting this site is that it is a natural pass through the hilly terrain. It has a series of lakes and pools for water and food in the form of fish and birds. There's a ready source of freeze-fractured stone blocks. Nature was generous to anyone who wanted to live here, and many clearly did over a very long period of time. The landscape of blocks and straight-line layers itself suggests and inspires monument building, though those that were built are, even allowing for the ravages of the Army, slight.

A small part of the fractured landscape in the area, providing suggestion for monument-building and the stone materials, in a range of sizes, needed to do so.

 

We'll probably never fully comprehend the significance of and intent behind the building of this spectacular monument which remains described on official OS maps today as merely a 'cairn'. It deserves much better than this description and a dusty legal document at Cadw to protect it that nobody really knows about.

If you visit, please respect our Welsh heritage and note that this is a scheduled ancient monument, protected by law. It is a criminal offence to damage or deface such protected monuments. 

 

 

North Wales Today: Slave Legacy?

North Wales - or at least those parts of it which have slate strata in the area - has always been proud of its slate quarrying heritage. 

Long before anyone in Gwynedd Council understood they could protect their jobs for a fair few years by getting behind the UNESCO World Heritage bid, locals in the area discussed, walked around and celebrated slate in their own, respectful way.

By the fist quarter of the 21st century, slate has transitioned from a useful roofing material to an infinitely more valuable commodity: tourism.

Like practically every UNESCO bid, the underlying motivation is 'economic development' through attracting hordes of tourists. In North Wales, this need for economic development - money - is desperate. What few good job there used to be in the post-WW2 era - jobs such as nuclear energy, metal smelting and chemicals - have all long ago packed-up and left. 

So you can't blame folks from trying to do something. And tourism is inevitably that something, because it's relatively easy and cheap to set up and the money will tend to roll in forever. As will the problems - and there has been an abundance of those in the post-Covid era, where millions got used to not visiting the Costa Brava and came to trash North Wales instead.

But I digress. 

Today's point is this: are we simply glorifying slate in a way that those who experienced the worst of Penrhynism, the all-controlling system of production applied at most sites, that ensured workers were constantly in fear of their livelihoods and the very homes they slept in?

The answer is complex and interesting. For sure, those in the 19th century who crossed over into the 20th would have had a pretty dim view of their working conditions, constantly eroded by the landed elite, Lord Penrhyn, who is widely despised, even today, as the man who "stole a mountain", an objectively true assertion.

The 1900-1903 'Streic Fawr' (Great Strike), rooted in dissatisfaction going back at least 25 years earlier, remains the longest-running industrial dispute in UK history. It reduced people to poverty and destitution. It turned one family against another. And it led to a very high proportion - at least a half - leaving for the South Wales coalfields and elsewhere, where the going was still tough, but the rewards somewhat greater.

'Papur Pawb', a popular Welsh newspaper, carried a number of poignant cartoons during the three year long Great Strike at Penrhyn slate quarry. The destitution forced upon his workers by Lord Penrhyn isn't something that gets nearly as much coverage as it should. It was a system of 'white slavery' in a very real sense.

 

Penrhyn was so wealthy - on the back of money made in the Atlantic slave trade - that he could afford to disregard his workers' withdrawal of their labour and simply shut 'his' quarry down, or operate it at vastly-reduced capacity, for three years.

This system - Penrhynism - is often referred to as the money made on the backs of black African slaves being reinvested back home to make slaves of white Welsh men. 

And that, too, is an objectively true statement. Quite apart from the money made from slavery itself, the system of compensating slave owners so that abolition could proceed without too much resistance, yielded over £20 million at 2024 prices for the Pennant ('Penrhyn') family, if we use the per-capita GDP deflator as a reasonable measure.

Compensation records for the Pennant slave owners.

 

Whilst quarrymen did not suffer the savage, inhuman and unrewarded treatment of African slaves, their pay was meagre at best and undermined as time went on owing to the introduction of 'middle men' to handle and award extraction concessions within a quarry - the so-called 'bargains'.

Penrhyn men's houses were often owned by the estate and that meant any resistance to the system would mean both a loss of income and a loss of home. It was a calculated system of total control over the workers: do as the Lord says, or else enter immediate destitution. It was as deliberate as it was harsh.

Of course, this was all a long time ago now. Quarries have changed hands many times and conditions within them would be unrecognisable to the men of the 'Streic Fawr'. If you ask some of the now elderly workers who are still alive as to whether they would go back to quarrying, the answer is invariably an enthusiastic 'yes!' 

Maybe they are sincere about that. Or maybe they have forgotten the hardship. In most cases, this embrace of the industry in which they worked is based on the strong comradeship they enjoyed, not what they were doing. Comradeship forged at work, under harsh conditions. Perhaps it's not unlike the comradeship of those who endured WW1 in appalling conditions, leaving a sense that, despite it all, perhaps it was the best time of their lives.

Yet, some things haven't changed. The current owners of Penrhyn quarry, which still has around 25 years' worth of extraction left and has just been granted an extension consent, is owned by those from outside the area.

The Penrhyn (new) quarry, now about to extend further south.

Welsh Slate Ltd is registered in Derby, England. It is a part of the Breedon Group, which is apparently owned by Keith Breedon, the only listed person with significant control, with more than a 75% stake in that latter company. His registration is given as Kent, England. Nothing can be found readily about him online.

So money from the Welsh slate industry would appear to be legging it across the border to England. Though Breedon and Welsh slate have of course done nothing unlawful or otherwise wrong, the money's fate remains pretty much the same as under Penrhyn, who had an imposing, oppressive fake castle home in the area, but was rarely resident there to spend much of it

Altogether, Wales ought to have made quite a large amount of money for itself from the slate industry - had that slate not been taken over - stolen in the case of Lord Penrhyn - by English elite and other capitalists of a lesser stature. 

Wales could have created a sovereign wealth fund, where natural resources on its land fed money into a fund that would pay for infrastructure and other benefits for all the people of Wales. 

But that was the heyday of imperialism. Wales was just a remote part of the UK that the English could take from what it wanted, giving nothing back. That attitude, too, is something we continue to live with today.

Whether we should be celebrating and even fetishising such an industry of exploitation - of both resource and men - is debatable. Personally, I think it's something we should recognise, but with a much better effort to recall just how bad things were for so many, for so long.

 

 

 

 

The Welsh Archaeological industry: a new imperialism?

Back in late 2022, I contacted the director of a local archaeological trust to raise an important issue that, you would hope, such a trust would accept without question.

That issue was language, and how Wales' heritage is, according to my thesis, being quietly undermined by non-Welsh speakers who, nevertheless, occupy positions of influence.

A position of influence can be as simple as a contractor undertaking archaeological surveys. For reasons of population density, if nothing else, one is more likely to find surveying companies based outside Wales, rather than within it. Accordingly, there is a very high and almost certain likelihood of non-Welsh speaking contractors being deployed to Wales to conduct surveys on behalf of arch. trusts, Welsh Government and others. 

In the same week as this enquiry - we'll come to the astonishing response shortly - I read a Ph.D. thesis about 17th and 18th century defences of an island involved in slavery. This was the first time I'd ever seen someone write with humility such that the author plainly put forward her position as a white, western female taught by and bearing the biases of the system that she grew up within. It's a remarkable piece of writing, the author explaining to me that it was "the thesis I wanted to write", rather than of a kind she might be expected to write. It's a real credit to her supervisor and institution, too.

What the author highlighted - and something that ought to be standard practice in the industry - was her own background; we are all products of the system that we are familiar with, and we have to be very careful not to become a form of imperialist, forcing our own worldview onto places, people and archaeological sites that we may come to examine in areas not within our usual haunts and direct lived experience.

But this humility is, so far as any texts I've ever read, never seen in works about Wales, despite the regular use of archaeological contractors who do not speak Welsh. By not speaking Welsh, they will strongly tend to miss important clues from place and feature names that very often carry crucial hints or even plain statements of what those places and features were or related to.

Being non-Welsh speakers, these kinds of problems simply do not occur to practically any of the companies asked to survey and work on our archaeological heritage. The further risk that then appears is one of re-interpreting Wales through non-Welsh eyes and minds. And if you think there is no evidence for this, you're very much mistaken.

Coming back to the brief exchange with the director of the arch, trust, he asserted his belief - put forward more as just an assertion and in what would appear to be thinly-veiled pique, that the Welsh (singular) terms, 'buarth' and 'corlan', apply only to single sheepfolds and not to the complex folds the English call 'multicellular' sheepfolds.

The sheer idiocy and, more importantly, ignorance displayed in this assertion made, remember, by a director of an arch. trust, is as breathtaking as it is deeply troubling.

How can we be in this utterly unacceptable situation in Wales, and is the director of the trust simply a 'rogue' actor? 

The answers are to be found in a Freedom of Information Act request I made in the autumn of 2023. It asked, simply, how many people could be considered Welsh-speaking at Welsh Government as a whole, and Cadw, as the Welsh Government's heritage body. The response was again very worrying indeed:

The figures are, to me, unbelievable, a quarter century after Welsh devolution. But the situation depicted by the numbers is even worse, once we take the starred qualification into account. Level 3 Welsh is not at all near good enough to claim proficiency and certainly a very long way indeed from understanding complex, nuanced and archaic language one will encounter when working in archaeological heritage. Worse again is that the numbers are all self-reported, so it's almost inevitably an overly-optimistic assessment.

In recent years, there has been a growing and vocal level of dissent about the anglicisation of place names, notably in relation to the mountains of Eryri, a national park that recently entirely abandoned the use of 'Snowdonia' in its official work, albeit having much earlier embraced English names for places here. This is the kind of resolute action we need to see within the archaeological industry in Wales, too.

The Irish Sea: intervisibility of landscapes.

Recently, prompted by a daughter going off to study ancient history, I re-read an interesting and important paper - 'Fluid Horizons' by Aaron Watson in The Neolithic of the Irish Sea: Materiality and traditions of practice, Oxbow Books, 2004, pp.55-63.

The piece is important not least because, for the overwhelming majority of people who don't live in the right places, there is no recognition that distant lands are in fact visible from any given location and that the degree of visibility changes, sometimes dramatically so.

The Isle of Man under superrefraction as seen at ~86km from the north coast of Anglesey at 100m amsl. Notice the effect is apparent over the distance to the IoM, but the ship at far fewer km out to sea is unaffected from this vantage point.

 

Reducing Watson's paper to the bare essentials, the idea is that the coastal regions of the Irish Sea, centred loosely on the Isle of Man, make up a realm that, from height, can be perceived visually.

Watson gives photographic examples of intervisibility, but these are for the most part from various heights in mountainous parts. He does mention the case of Barclodiad y Gawres' view of Ireland, which is achieved from only about 9m above sea level. But the examples I give here are from just under 100m amsl, showing that mountainous terrain per se is not required for intervisibility in the Irish Sea region.

Container ship off the coast of California, with a superrefracted, inverted image above. The enhanced vertical extent can render objects visible from extended distances.

Watson also briefly mentions "mythologies" of islands appearing on the horizon, though the reference he cites for this - The Enchanceted Lands: Myths and legends of Britain's landscapes, Janet and Colin Bord, Harper Collins, 1995 - draws on one book in a series by that husband-and-wife team that is decidedly of its period and very much plays up the 'New Age' magical, mysterious and mythical elements. That is a particular genre with a particular audience and which we might say does not qualify much as academically-authoritative, however well-intentioned.

Despite the potential shortcomings of that book series, the authors were certainly on to something concrete. After 13 years of living on a low hill (Mynydd Parys) on the north coast of Anglesey, I can testify that changing atmospheric conditions lead to interesting effects in respect of the visibility of Irish Sea locations.

Key in this regard is the phenomenon of Fata Morgana - more technically described as superrefraction. Though it may be more common in colder climates, it nevertheless is conclusively shown from my own and many others' examples to occur anywhere, notably over the sea, the conditions are right. It is by no means a rare phenomenon around the Irish Sea coasts, arising perhaps half a dozen times a year or so.

Most commonly, superrefraction appears when the sea is cold and the weather has suddenly snapped to a hot period, giving rise to a steep temperature gradient over the sea. This can sometimes lead to the spectacular vision of a ship at sea sailing along with a perfect inverted image of itself hovering immediately above. More commonly, it leads to ever-changing, imperfect images of distant lands, often taking the form of partial images with flattened, plate-like tops as light hits a strong refracting boundary.

'Castles in the air' - Mourne mountains, Northern Ireland, appear at 138km from Anglesey as vertically enhanced with tower-like projections - a result of inverted images of the hills. Slieve Donard at right.

 

Mourne mountains under very clear but non-superrefracting conditions. The apparent height is much reduced, relative to that under superrefraction.

Mourne mountains under superrefraction, showing strong horizontal distortion as well as vertical enhancement.

Inevitably, superrefraction will have been an important element in enhancing the view of far-off lands that would, then as now, seem magical and bizarre to people. They would have struggled to explain the phenomenon and no doubt found the images, sometimes displaying castle-like vertical enhancements, a strong draw to investigation.

Cumbria, at 140km, seen from the north coast of Anglesey, with modest backlighting rendering the scene much more visible than is ordinarily the case. Cumbria is indeed rarely visible from this location at all.

 

In future discussions of intervisibility across the Irish Sea and indeed elsewhere, it will be crucial to recognise and take into account the unique and mesmerising role of superrefraction. Other effects, such as the backlighting (silhouetting) evident in the image of Cumbria, snow cover (highlighting landscape features) and variable transparency also need to be taken into account. Even clouds, notably towering cumulus and related species should be considered, as these frequently form over the Isle of Man and Cumbria, revealing the position of those landscapes, if not necessarily their form on any given occasion.

Latest update - Corlannau (Buarthau/Ffaldiau).

'Buarth y Bobl', Cors y Gwaed, Gwynedd.

 

The interest over the past year here has been with sheepfolds, mostly of the multicellular form seen in numbers across north and, to a lesser degree, south Wales.

Noting this is an ongoing and not complete text, the latest update of my text can be found here.

Croeso to Cadw!

Croeso - welcome - to my new blog, Welsh Archaeology.

Whilst archaeology is in the title, I certainly won't be limiting the blog to matters archaeological. Heritage, history, anything remotely linked to the story of Wales, is fair game for coverage here.

Why start the blog?  Mainly, I've grown increasingly alarmed by the state of the professional heritage and archaeological industry within Wales and think it's time this insular community faced some public scrutiny.

Rather than sounding like a conspiracy theory nutter, I'm starting the blog off with an example of how low Cadw has become, arising from a Freedom of Information Act request disclosure which was made just a few days ago. Only this morning did I have the opportunity for the unpleasant experience of reading the documents.

Back in 2022, prompted by the annual International Marconi Day amateur radio event at the site, I took up in earnest my earlier passing interest in what happened at the Marconi 'Carnarvon' very low frequency (VLF) wireless site at Cefn Du. This was a site of prime importance to the United Kingdom in the WW1 era and was an important commercial VLF site for much of its 25 year-long life. On September 22, 1918, Carnarvon sent the first ever direct, non-relayed wireless message to Australia (though tests achieving the same had been conducted up to a year earlier).

When I say 'earnest interest', I mean a year's worth of trudging across a huge early wireless site located on a wet, windy and sometimes blisteringly hot north Wales mountainside plus exhaustive examination of Oxford Bodleian's extensive Marconi archive. None of this had any financial or other support from anyone, except for my own pocket which took quite a hit, all told.

Marconi's Carnarvon station, ca. 1918. Original author unknown.

Roll on to September 2022, and my very early draft text, still very much a work in progress, had to be released to Cadw because I had resurrected earlier abortive calls for scheduling (legal protection) and it was clear the existing official records left an awful lot to be desired. Much of it was simply wrong. Though I was reluctant and indeed embarrassed to release a work-in-progress document, I did so to ensure Cadw were acting on the best information then available. 

By late September of 2022, the first edition of my work was published. It quickly advanced to the third edition by early 2023, mainly because the first edition had to go out earlier than I would have wanted, as I believed Cadw may well try to publish something of their own, having been caught rather lacking in their own work on the site. My work was simultaneously added to the official Historical Environment Record.

Roll on to October 2023 - 17 months after I asked Cadw to schedule the Marconi site, nothing had been announced.

I started thinking something wasn't quite right here. Cadw's guide to scheduling says that it can take "weeks or sometimes months" to complete the process. Why the delay? I decided that they had rather been having me on, and so I made a FoIA request on what had been happening for all that time.

The disclosure revealed, firstly, that Cadw are severely under-resourced, as most public services in the UK these days, and for a long time, had ceased scheduling sites in Wales. Indeed, for some time, they seem not to have actually had a Scheduling Officer. Nothing in the legislation permits Cadw to cease scheduling and their no-scheduling 'policy' went without any public announcement. In short, it was a certain improper ignoring of the law to meet financial ends. It is not clear whether any formal requests to schedule - which anyone, including single members of the public can make - were actually ignored during this period.

Secondly, the disclosure showed that the 'Historical Background' to Cadw's 'desk study' (a review of studies on the site) had highlighted my "extensive" (as they put it) "private research" and that it formed "part of" (actually, the definitive part) of the official record for the site. 

Despite, therefore, clearly knowing about my text and having found it to be a large amount of work, Cadw simply ignored all of it, and went on to write a summary history of the site based on assertions that I had already proven, with copious referencing and input from world-class VLF and other engineers, were wholly incorrect.

Cadw repeated the incorrect claim that the inverted-L antenna used by Marconi "gave a better signal" in certain directions - i.e. that the antenna was directional. This is just plain wrong. My text highlights a journal article by Bucher - a Marconi engineer- from...wait for it...1920 - that accepted the inverted-L "was not directional in the manner believed". Even earlier than this - around the 1910s - German engineers had clearly said they did not accept the antenna was directional. Cadw simply keep repeating this false claim, despite my work to comprehensively show it was never true. Why?

Cadw claim the Carnarvon site was "complete by 1924". This is again wrong and also covered in depth in my text. A new antenna - GLJ (previously given, wrongly, by Vyvyan in his 1933 work as 'GLT') - was erected in 1925. It wasn't satisfactorily finished until around early 1927, having presented significant adverse interactions with the other transmitting circuits.

Cadw also claim, as they have done for a very long time, that the station was known as "Caernarfon", this being the modern Welsh name of the world-famous town. This simply isn't true. Throughout the station's life, it was known by the Marconi WT company as 'Carnarvon' - the anglicised version of the placename, which was commonly used at the time. Cadw claim that the station was, moreover "more commonly" known by other names such as "Cefn Du" and "Waunfawr". The press used these names, but Marconi never did and the archive letters and other documents prove this. 

Why does Cadw keep making these false claims?  Is it to avoid upsetting the more rabid Welsh-speakers (I am one, and don't find a historical account remotely upsetting - it's a fact of the time and one that tells us about the England-Wales relationship)?  Or was Cadw just lazy and couldn't be bothered to read any of my text and stop copying and pasting what has been written before? Either is just as likely as the other and both may have in fact been at play.

Beyond this, their new Scheduling Officer - evidently inundated by "over 100 sites" needing consideration for protection - writes to a colleague to consider the boundary for the site's scheduling, a very important aspect of the process (not least because it affects landowners), even though I had prepared a complete plot of the site, including relating remains to function - something that has always been way beyond the skillset of anyone at Cadw and other official heritage bodies and the first time anyone had ever done this.

Other documents show other staff finding difficulty in accessing my Google Earth plot of the site. They also claim, again because they say they "don't have the software" to open any of these files (funny - Google Earth is freely available as a purely online service!), couldn't access a 'Shapefile' prepared by the local archaeological trust, and seem to have simply given up at this point, not asking anyone for help to examine the plots that took a year to prepare. 

This is my plot of Carnarvon, down to the level, in some cases, of small bolts on the ground. Why would Cadw simply not bother trying to make use of this?

 

The Scheduling Officer also wonders what remains may be found following a survey he believes may take place - either unaware of or else completely ignoring my work again, I cannot say which - some nine months after my work was published!

This may appear to be a storm in a teacup and, in the greater scheme of things, may well be. But Cadw are the official advisors to Welsh ministers on heritage matters and they have a duty to the public and, I would argue, to the legal scheduling process, to ensure the historical details they provide in their assessment and, later, formal desciption of the scheduled site, includes the latest and most reliable information that is possible for any given historical location.

It is not for Cadw to adopt an antagonistic attitude towards the author of a carefully-conducted piece of work. And it is not for them, either, to adopt a 'not invented here' response to someone other than themselves doing this kind of work.

Very unacceptably Cadw, as an agency (and no comment is made on individual staff), in this case, are readily shown to be, I would argue, negligent in these duties and, moreover, seemingly deliberately not making any effort to update their understanding and account of the site. This cannot be to the benefit of this or any other site it may apply to. The heritage of Wales deserves better.

For what it's worth, I've protested to the Director of Cadw and asked him to ensure these false details are never again published by this agency. 

The seemingly-positive news is that Cadw appear to agree that Marconi's Carnarvon site does meet the criteria for scheduling, but it has yet to conclude the process.

[UPDATE, 2023 November 16]

Cadw has responded positively to the criticisms made above and agreed to cease publishing incorrect information about the station. There was no explanation as to why such information kept being published.  The map showing the intended protection boundary, now supplied when it had earlier been left out of a FoIA release, shows Cadw had managed to access my plots and used these as the basis for the boundary. They hadn't acknowledged the plots' source however.