Castell Henllys and a journey into the Iron Age...

I would love to share with you a place I love so much, and try to visit whenever I'm in Wales... It is a place where you can really feel the weave of past and present as a continuous thread, and where the people of the past seem only a veil of shadow away. It is so easy here to imagine their voices, dim laughter through the woodsmoke, the daily rhythms of shared toil and community...


Castell Henllys near Cardigan in Wales is an Iron Age Hillfort, where some of the roundhouses have been rebuilt on their original foundations and ongoing living archaeological work brings back the past. They keep native sheep and boar and have built a medicinal herb garden... The people who tend this place for visitors always seem such gentle folk with a genuine love for the place, dressed in iron-age garb and showing the crafts and skills that were used in daily life here...
Every time I am here I wish I could stay!

I will show you some things along the wooded paths that wind around the hillfort. Don't be alarmed if my children change size in some of the pictures! I have taken the best pictures from the last three visits!
The first thing you see as you arrive is this magnificent totem pole...


Some hidden carvings emerge from the green...

This year someone had begun making a coracle by the riverside...


And last year a Wicker Man awaited fire on the hilltop...


And if you know the hidden path, you will find a Shrine where a natural spring emerges from the hillside beneath the fort. There are all sorts of offerings and trophys of war... It feels very real!


Here is the Blacksmith's house...

The utterly impressive Chieftain's house with its high roof where swallows nest and flit in and out of the low doorway... If the Chieftain's house was designed to impress and convey status, then it certainly held me in awe when I first saw it!





The Granary on its curious legs...

A smaller homely roundhouse where the children ground corn into flour and made flat breads to cook on the griddles ( and of course like little Goldilocks twins they tried every bed in every house!)

Elswyth making bread

It is so nice for the children to experience all this... next time they shall have to try their hand at wattle and daub - they were too shy this time to have their faces and arms decorated with blue woad, but after all they are a bit small yet for war!



And lastly my favourite place of all. I could sit and dream all day in the big communal roundhouse. I feel so at home watching the sun slant throught the woodsmoke that blackens the thatch overhead, imagining the evenings they would have had here sharing songs and stories out of the wind and weather. The walls are painted with beasts and spirals, the benches well worn. It is dark yet your eyes soon grow accustomed. It is a warm, peaceful place and I am never ready to leave.
My pictures really don't do it justice and just can't convey the atmosphere I feel here. It is a place you need to feel with all your senses, to hear the embers in the fire, smell the soot in the timbers of the houses, touch the wood, grind the flour, immerse yourself in the past...
I love it (can you tell?)
If you are near or passing by, do visit and discover for yourselves!
www.castellhenllys.com