A Works Trip to Mid Wales

Wednesday 22 June 2005. Another trip for work and this time the car hire firm have dropped off a Nissan X-Trail. Not that work were so extravagant with their travel funding, but I was using hire cars such a lot that if the firm had customers for all of their smaller cars they would pick their regular customers to upgrade at no extra cost.

I was heading to Newtown in mid Wales and my route took me through Oswestry, so I stopped for a look at the old hill fort.

Whilst it had the usual rings of earthworks there were a few surprises for any would-be assailants in the form of pits and banks perpendicular to the circumference. They would have been much deeper 1500 years ago than they appear now and I reckon the authorities have probably made the owners of the site remove any rusty sword blades and sharpened stakes that might await anyone luckless enough to fall down the side of one of these pits!

Old Oswestry (Hen Ddinas in Welsh) was built around 800 BCE and occupied, according to most sources including English Heritage under whose care it is and Wikipedia, up until 43 CE. 43 CE is a curiously precise date, so I'm not sure how it was derived.

There is a legend that King Arthur's Guinevere was born here and that would have been some 360-400 years later if, indeed, he ever actually existed. So either that's just a legend also or we have to believe that her mother, on the brink of giving birth, decided to climb up the steep slopes of the hillfort, that rises almost 27 metres (90 ft), whilst avoiding falling into the pits in order to give birth...

I was meeting a colleague, Alan, and we were staying here at a country hotel called the Maesmawr Hotel just south of Newtown. Alan had further to travel than myself, living just outside Edinburgh and I picked him up at Newtown Station before going to book in at the hotel.

We found the hotel fairly easily. The Maesmawr was a wonderful black and white timbered building, dating from 1565 a mile from a place called Caersws - as impossible to guess at the pronunciation as Maesmawr was...

Over a period of several months I worked closely with a team at the University of Glamorgan and my main contact there told me once that if you want to learn Welsh you should start by ignoring from an English viewpoint how words are spelt... After a dozen years of regularly visiting Wales, my grasp of the Welsh language is limited to simple phrases like "Good morning" and (because road traffic signs are written in both languages) words like "Stop", "Slow", "Welcome to...", and the one I used the most: "humpback bridge"...

This was the view from my bedroom window.

The hotel was very close to the River Severn. Most surviving buildings of this age are close to rivers come to think of it. They would have provided water for drinking, washing, and cleaning and also perhaps (hopefully a little downstream) for getting rid of waste.

The menu for our evening meal included Welsh lamb. "Ah well..." said Alan, whose slender frame belied his capacity for food, "I think we deserve it!"

The hotel entrance. A strong woody smell came from the orchids in the entrance hall. On the wall... no... it can't be... It was. Bambi's mum!

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Chun Castle

Wednesday 7 August 1996. The Cornwall holiday continues... We split up for the day, Mum and Dad coming with Fran and myself round some stone circles and hill forts whilst the rest went to a theme park. We drove round the coast past Zennor where a legend says, a mermaid was so enchanted by the sound of a chorister's voice from the church that she enticed him into the sea and he lived with her wrinkly ever after from then on.

This is Chun Castle, (it's pronounced "Choon"), an Iron Age hillfort. At one point you could walk from the east of Britain to the Netherlands, or Germany but Britain was cut off from the rest of Europe when the last ice age melted and formed the North Sea. Whilst the first cities were being built in the middle east the British were still living in stick and mud huts in fortified circles on the tops of hills. The fort dates from around 300-200 BCE and has two rings of walls and a ditch surrounding it.

The gorse was in abundance - the farmer on whose land we parked told me the weather "...has been very good for the shrubs this year. You'll have to mind it!" The gorse looks lovely from a distance. Close up it has small two inch branches covered in spine like leaves which just then were pricking through trousers and skirts and up to shirts and tops as the bushes were anything up to 3 feet tall! Mum gave up in the face of the gorse (well it came farther up on her than anyone else as she's a bit smaller than the rest of us!) and she went back to sit in the car whilst we explored. The photo shows a clearing in the centre of the fort with the remains of what I first took to be someone's hearth, but which has been described as an iron or tin smelting furnace. Slag heaps of both metals were found within the fort.

Chun Castle boasts the foundations of much of its surrounding defensive wall, now reduced to what looks like a pile of rubble in the shape of a huge ring. It's still around five feet in height although originally it would have been around four times that size. It has a couple of gateposts still standing. The hillfort is in a superb position on the Lands End peninsula and you can see both the south and west coasts from its wall which afforded its residents some amount of warning should an enemy appear.

In a clearing in the gorse which now covers most of the interior, the castle's well, choked with fallen stone can be seen. A set of stone stairs led down to the water which still finds its way into the well even now. It was still used by locals upto c1940. Some sources suggest that locals thought it would give them perpetual youth. If so there must have been some sort of mass exodus from the area as there are definately not two and a half to three thousand years worth of youths living nearby... Also clearly visible from the fort are the remains of a couple of the distinctive engine houses of Cornish tin mines.

A couple of gate posts or markers stood along the path into the fort. A further post from the outer wall stands behind my viewpoint.

It can be seen in this view, just behind the only other person we saw that morning at Chun. At some point the layout of the entrance was changed to create a dog's leg turn between the two gates in the outer and inner walls, and the fort has been described as being far more advanced in its military design than other forts of the same period.

The gatepost from the outer wall. Fran and Dad decided to go back and keep Mum company as we had been mooching around for quite a while and she may have been wondering if we'd fallen down the well and just run off like the children we may have become... Meanwhile I have one more thing to see which will take me back in time a further two to three thousand years from the hillfort. But that, as a quizmaster would say just before a TV break, is why you will come back tomorrow - won't you?

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