HLW (C) 4

Lower Elwy Valley  

2001  

Special  

Designated  

This contained landscape is closely defined by the gorge of the River Elwy as it rounds Cefn Meiriadog, a low ridge on the eastern fringes of the Rhos Hills in north Denbighshire, and lying south west of St Asaph on the west side of the Vale of Clwyd. The valley’s narrow floor gently rises from about 30m above OD in the east to about 50m above OD in the west, while its densely wooded sides rise steeply or even precipitously in places as they cut through to the surrounding low hills and the Ice Age. The deposits have been scientifically dated to some time around 225,000 years ago. Subsequent advances and retreats of ice have substantially remodelled the valley’s topography, and the excavation results suggest that the position of the cliff face and cave mouth at the time of the occupation was some distance forward of their present position. This weathering back of the cliff face would have caused the removal of most of the evidence for the occupation of the site, particularly from around the cave mouth, but in any event it appears that the deposits found in the surviving part of the cave were washed in as mud flows which fortuitously carried in and preserved residual material derived from the occupation of the site. To the north of Pontnewydd cave are the remains of medieval field systems in the form of strip lynchets, which hint at the area’s medieval agricultural economy, and sheltered beneath a wooded slope just above the valley floor to the east, are the ruins of the medieval holy well and chapel at Ffynnon Fair which attest to contemporary religious life in the area. The valley today presents a landscape of coherent historic interest which, though small in comparison to other historic landscape areas identified in this Register, is remarkably complete, for as well as the highly important early archaeological evidence contained in the caves, the landforms themselves provide a key to the interpretation of the area’s long sedimentary history and tantalizing glimpses of the environment of the earliest known inhabitant of Wales.