Latest Report from Mynydd Y Betws stone row (“a mixture of good and bad”)

from Sandy Gerrard

10.45 am Wednesday 9th February
Spent most of yesterday on the mountain. Took about 250 photographs and identified a large number of previously unrecorded cairns. One was over 20m in diameter. I need to write a more detailed report on my findings but the news is a mixture of good and bad. The good is that the NE end of the row is intact, the bad news is that the row has indeed been cut through in two places. According to reports in the newspapers today around 5m of the row has been destroyed. This equates to a 2.5m length for each of the two new roads. I would have thought that 100 ton lorries would need a road rather than wider than this. Two of the three cairns within the new road corridor have been protected but the third no longer survives. Two other cairns have been damaged, one since the first visit. They have built a ditch leading from the road which is spewing water onto the row. According to today’s paper the work is being monitored by Cadw and Dyfed Archaeological Trust. They need to be asked whether it is acceptable to divert surface run off from the new road onto the stone row and insert a fence post into the edge of a cairn.
Work on the roads and turbine bases is now very well advanced and the opportunity to carry out a field survey has been squandered. Future work in the area will only be able to hint at what has been lost in this very special prehistoric ceremonial landscape.

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