Carreg Coetan Arthur

A funny, fairy; enchanted little place, attached as it is to the side of a modern housing development. Carreg Coetan Arthur squats to the side of neatly clipped lawn and is accessed from the road through a gate in the hedgerow, I half wondered if the gate was there to keep beasts out, to keep beasts in, (fairy cattle perhaps), or perhaps to stop the stones wandering off should the mood take them!

At the time that the small estate of bungalows and holiday cottages were built around Carreg Coetan Arthur, there was a plan by archaelogists to move the dolman to the Cardiff Museum, thankfully strong local protests prevented this act of vandalism. Today the stones remain in context to their enviroment and within minutes of exploring the site the surrounding encroachment is forgotten. The stones stand under the watchfull gaze of the holy mountain of Mynydd Carningli, close to the Nevern river estuary from where perhaps the bluestones for Stonehenge were 'shipped' on the coastal leg of their journey to Wiltshire.

Radio-carbon dating gives the early date of 5500 years old (middle neolithic) for the construction of Carreg Coetan Arthur. Inside the chamber has been found many examples of much later Grooved Ware and Beaker Ware, meaning that the site had been in use over an extended period of time. The build up of many centuries of plough soil has hidden the fact that the stones would have originally stood as much a metre taller than they appear today. I attempted to trace the outline of the now vanished earth mound amongst the surrounding lumps, dips and furrows, unfortuately, I believe the mound extends outside the boundary of the sites present small enclosure.

Notes from Carreg Coetan Arthur: There are fairies at the bottom of these gardens. A small magic-mushroom place, there are four standing stones and a large flat capstone that sits upon them. Correction: the capstone sits upon just two of the uprights - fairy magic indeed!