Pilgrimage

The "Golden Road" is an east-west track of 10km along the central ridge of the eastern Preseli hills. We walked half of it two years ago and I described its name then as an example of "dry Welsh wit", it being "a trudge across sodden, acid, black, peat moorland. Sheep-wrecked, treeless, wind-scoured and Mordor-monotone in grey November light, a place of brooding spirits and methane-bubbling pools"

Today we went back to complete the character-building experience, this time from the east and with a little kinder light, but it remains a brooding, desolate, deserted place. In every direction, the ground erupts with fractured, tumbling outcrops of massive grey stones, forming alarming profiles against the sky, accentuating the strangeness of the place

As we walked we wound time backwards. A stiff initial climb to the top of Foel Drygarn - the most eastern hill of the range. The Tolkeinesque name means 'Hill of Three Cairns'. At the top are concentric circles of defensive walls of an Iron Age hill fort (here, 'Iron Age' means 800BCE - 43CE). Within the central circle, are three even more ancient burial cairns - massive piles of large stones - that are Bronze Age - up to 2000 years older than the fort. That they were not plundered during the fort's occupation suggests a long-lasting reverence for their significance 

Further on was Bedd Arthur - Arthur's Grave (he has quite a few!) - a small but atmospheric stone 'circle' (or elipse, rectangle, horseshoe - it has been described in many ways) of 15 stones (two now fallen). This gets us back to at least the early Bronze Age, possibly into the Neolithic Stone Age, earlier than 2500BCE

Finally, we dropped north, off the path, until the outcrop that was also our objective two years ago appeared around the shoulder of the hill. Another imposing outcrop, shattered into multi-tonne megaliths, arranged in a chaotic pile - the playthings of an adolescent giant. This is Carn Goedog - a name now internationally known, but a site so remote that it remains unsigned, largely unvisited and defiant. It is one of the quarries that - around 3300BCE, in the middle of the Neolithic Stone Age - provided  the bluestone slabs for the circle at nearby Waun Mawn, which were removed to Stonehenge three or four centuries later

We marvelled once more, ate our sandwiches, and walked back to the present, reconciled to the spirit of the place