I love the old places and visit them when I can. I have been fortunate to spend time at many of these sites over the years.. though there are thousands more in Britain alone that I have yet to see. I never drive past one of those intriguing brown road signs that say 'Ancient Monument'.


There is a real feeling of connection with the past of our race, a surge of continuity and rightness at these places, and a feeling of coming home as one enters the compass of the forces that swirl through these sites.

Perched on a hilltop, guarding a vale that looks to the sea stands Pentre Ifan. The massive capstone , 16 tonnes and 5 meters long, balances incredibly on the uprights that have held it for over 5500years. From these same hills the bluestones were quarried that were transported to Stonehenge.


This site was a home for the dead of Ivan's Village (Pentre Ifan) and the ditches and mounds can be traced on the ground. It is a lonely site and remote, now, but traces of the community that held faith here can be found in abundance.

Excavations in 1936-7 and 1958-9 showed that the burial chamber originally lay within a shallow oval pit, and that the trapezoidal mound of earth covering it was up to 36m (120ft) long. It is a design that is found in many places throughout the British Isles, and mounds like this still exist in varying states, from those still shrouded in their blanket of earth to scattered stones, folornly bereaved from their purpose.


Bryn Celli Dhu on the Isle of Anglesey still retains its earth and circle wall.

At Pentre Ifan there are legends of ghosts and fairies and of a portal to the Otherworld and it is easy to feel why. These houses of the dead, where the ancestors bones were kept, tended and honoured are indeed the hollow hills of myth where one can step across the threshold of life into the continous stream of existence that is the Otherworld.