Across The Street From A Hillfort

(Photo: Part of Offa’s Dyke Trail as it approaches Moel Fenlli)

My impulsive jaunt to Llanbedr DC has turned out to be one of the most spectacular field trips of my life. About 15% of that is due to staying across the street from a hillfort, and the other 85% is due to staying with Gillian, a local archaeologist who specializes in prehistory, manages the Llangollen Museum, and probably knows the name of every man-made bump in the grass within a thirty-mile radius, not to mention refers to Moel Fenlli affectionately as “her hillfort.”

Llanbedr-Dyffryn-Clwyd isn’t a town, exactly. Wikipedia refers to it as a village. Ruthin, beautiful Llangollen and Wrexham seem to be the principal towns in the area, and between them are a scattering of hamlets—really just clusters of whitewashed stone farm cottages that accumulate in the nooks between the steep hills as if they slid there. The hills are covered in heather and gorse, sometimes with small groves packed into the seams of the valleys. From a distance, the voices of the hundreds of sheep in the fields combine to sound like a crowd howling in a colosseum undercut by a purring motor.

This is a place that wears its history right on its skin. The steep, heather-clad hills of the Clwydian Range run from here to the sea, each crowned by a Bronze Age hillfort. Moel Fenlli is visible from the front windows of Gillian’s cottage: the forts were occupied from around 3500 BC, and although the roundhouses and wooden palisades are millennia gone, the spectacular earthworks are still visible (if, that is, you’re fortunate enough to be staying with an archaeologist who can tell you what you’re looking at). These hilltop settlements of the Clwydian Range would have been within line-of-sight of one another. In their heyday, Gillian told me, they were probably united under one authority, because it’s hard to have independent settlements that close together without steeper natural boundaries. If they weren’t all under one ruler, then they must have at least been grouped geographically—Moel Fenlli and its neighbor would have been under one family, Moel Arthur could have been freestanding, the next pair would have been grouped, and so forth. The line-of-sight arrangement wasn’t a defensive mutual-aid precaution so much as it was a statement: “Don’t even bother trying to get past us; we can all see you.” You have to imagine what this would have looked like five thousand years ago, with smoke rising from behind high timber palisades dotting the hilltops as far as the eye could see.

Pictures never quite do justice to depth. You can’t tell from any of these how steep the sides of the hills are and how abruptly the ground plunges away into the deep valleys. In some places you feel like you’re teetering on the edge of a cliff, and if you got a running start and leapt, you could fall all the way to the valley floor.

The hillforts haven’t been excavated since the nineteenth century, but some things can be read just from the landscape and the raised mounds where houses used to be. Each fort consisted of a series of earthen ramparts and ditches, all overgrown with heather and gorse, surrounding the crown of a steep hill with a panoramic view of the valleys. The roundhouses clustered inside the defenses, where the ramparts and palisade help break the constant wind. On the other side of the palisade, fields and pastures cascaded down the slopes (some of the livestock enclosures are still demarcated by post-holes or depressions in the ground). Each of these hillforts is arranged around a monument of some sort in the middle. Within the ramparts, the crown of Moel Fenlli (pronounced vaguely like Moil Venthly, with that Welsh double-ll that English speakers can’t do) slopes upward to a mound. There’s no telling whether the mound is a burial. It’s now topped with a cairn erected gradually by hikers paying their respects.

The hike to reach Moel Fenlli is truly spectacular, and also not for the faint of heart. I’ve now done it three times, and have the shredded boots and blistered heels to show for it. From the car park, which is already halfway up from the valley floor, you climb a very steep grassy path that cuts nearly vertically up to a shoulder of the hill. There it levels out a little bit and turns into a gravelly track less than a foot wide that winds through a dense growth of black heather and thorny yellow-blooming gorse. The drop to the valley floor is nearly sheer in places. The lip of the path is squared-off. If you don’t know what you’re looking at, you might or might not realize that for part of the way, you’re traversing the top of a 5,500-year-old rampart.

The track wraps halfway around the hill, sometimes rising steeply and sometimes nearly leveling, until it reaches a flight of modern stairs that make the final ascent. At the top of the stairs, you pass through a gap in earthen ramparts that still stand a little taller than you. The wind drops abruptly in their shelter, but the enclosure continues to slope upward for forty feet or so until you reach the mound at the peak of the hill, and soon enough you’re being battered again. These settlements would have been blasted by the sun in the summer, scoured by the winds in the winter. There’s no shelter up there. But from the mound, squinting into the wind, you can see across whole kingdoms. That high up, the distance goes hazy. The hill drops away into high valleys filled with sheep and grass and marshy creeks shaded by copses of ash and rowan, and then drop further into the lowlands, patchworked with small fields and hamlets. The first time I made the climb, the sun turned the haze in the valley a syrupy amber like the literal mists of time. Yesterday it was clearer, and I could see all the way down the chain of hills to something faint and pale in the distance that I realized was the sea.

If you want to see what a hillfort looked like, here’s a reconstruction animation of Moel Fenlli. It doesn’t show the mound, but it’s still interesting.

http://www.clwydianrangeanddeevalleyaonb.org.uk/moel-fenlli/