HLW (D) 11

Pen Gaer: Garn Fawr and Stumble Head  

2001  

Special  

Designated  

This topographically and visually distinctive landscape area in north Pembrokeshire is centred on the prehistoric sites located on a broad ridge that forms part of the largest and southernmost headland on the Cardigan Bay coastline. The ridge is distinctive, not least because it lies parallel to the coast and straddles the width of the headland, thereby forming a physical barrier between the seaward facing slopes to the north and the gently rolling plateau surface of the mainland to the south. The ridge extends east north east from the stacks and cliffs of Dinas Mawr to Garnwnda and comprises high, craggy ground that reaches a height of 213m above OD at Garn Fawr, the principal summit. To the north, the headland is bounded by the cliffs and narrow rocky bays of Strumble Head and Carregwastad Point. Rising along the northern foot of the craggy ridge are a number of streams which drain north and north westwards to the coast. The area is one of dispersed settlement and a single hamlet settlement at Llanwnda itself, which in medieval times formed part of the lordship of Pen Caer, so named almost certainly because of the great hillfort on Garn Fawr. The numbers and contiguity of presumed Iron Age defended sites can be paralleled elsewhere, but the quantity of evidence for field systems associated here with these sites is exceptional. These are visible as low banks in the now open heath and moorland vegetation of the crags, and continue down the slope into the surrounding areas where the walls still form the boundaries of present day fields. In about 1700, the famous antiquarian, Edward Lhuyd, drew a sketch plan of Gaer Fawr hillfort, which is one of the earliest surveys of a British hillfort known. Subsequent antiquarian records of monuments and finds in the area are more circumstantial. More recently, a modern survey of Gaer Fawr postulated four phases of construction, with the attendant boundaries being modern; air photography, however, has identified other boundaries not recorded by ground-based survey. Whilst, therefore, the surviving pattern of field boundaries, tracks and narrow lanes surrounding the now open craggy upland is a palimpsest of different dates, the underlying elements are likely to be of prehistoric date since they so clearly relate to the defended and enclosed sites of Gaer Fawr, Gaer Fach and Ysgubor Gaer. To the north, the isolated farm of Llanwnwr may be an equally ancient holding or territorial unit. A Neolithic chambered tomb, one of three surviving within the area, is sited west of the farm, while there are 19th-century records of early medieval cist graves being discovered in the farmyard indicating that the site might be an ‘undeveloped’ cemetery of a small kin group. The isolated find spots of two Class I and Class II Early Christian monuments may hint at other dispersed, ‘undeveloped’ later cemeteries, perhaps serving kin groups in ways similar to that suggested for the Neolithic chambered tombs. Further east, Y Castell farm is recorded in medieval sources and lies close to a now eroded, oval enclosure. However, other crop-mark enclosures, now some distance from farms, demonstrate that there have been site shifts as well as continuity in settlements. Two obscure local saints are commemorated in surviving dedications; Gwyndaf at Llanwnda, and Degan in a now ruined cliff top chapel and in a holy well, Ffynnon Degan, about 1km to the south. There is, in fact, little or no evidence for any significant landscape reorganization by the new Norman bishops of St Davids within their holdings in this area, which remains wholly Welsh in character. The inhospitable north coast of the area is marked by Strumble Head lighthouse and Carregwastad Point where the French landed in 1797 in their attempt to capture Fishguard by surprise. The southern limit of the area, however, is far less definite as similar historic landscape elements and landforms continue. There has been no modern excavation in this landscape, unlike the heaths to the south. Yet the archaeological potential of Garn Fawr and Strumble Head is amply demonstrated by the density, diversity and chronological range of monument types, and it is likely that considerable advances in working out their relative chronologies could be made through non-intensive aerial reconnaissance and plotting.