Tinkinswood

"Don't let fear rule your life"
My tentative plans for a walk to The Punchbowl at Llanfoist with J have been postponed, he’s developed a back problem. Despite this I had decided on a “day out” so I decided on a last-minute visit to Tinkinswood, near Dyffryn Gardens. A had mentioned it and shown me photos at a recent Quaker meeting, it looked interesting, and in the event I combined it with lunch at Dyffryn.
The CADW site describes it as ‘A spectacular feat of prehistoric engineering’ which it certainly seemed to be to me. It’s ‘topped with one of largest capstones in Britain..weighing around 40 tons…Experts reckon that at least 200 individuals would have been required to hoist it into place.’ I wondered if these ‘experts’ were the same ones who portray Neolithic people as some sort of inferior species. I no longer buy into the academic archaeological perspective I was given as a youngster. At the very least the people who did this would have needed organisational skills, technological ability to move these massive stones around and the creativity and imagination to plan such a massive structure – and that more than 1,000 years (give or take several hundred years) before Stonehenge.
After lunch at Dyffryn I headed home through the traffic, stop-start or slow crawl at times. I was passed more than once by a motorhome which didn’t really register for a couple of passes. Then I saw writing on the back, again ignored, and eventually it passed again – with “Don't let fear rule your life” emblazoned on the back. A bit cliched now maybe, but I suddenly felt someone was trying to tell me something, a voice from my ancestors perhaps.