Carningli hillfort

Carningli hillfort is a large and prominent archeological site on the top of Mynydd Carningli south of Newport, Pembrokeshire in west Wales. It is situated in the Pembrokeshire Coast National Park.

Description

This hillfort, generally dated to the Iron Age and assumed to be from the first millennium BC, is located on the summit of Mynydd Carningli, about a mile from Newport in Pembrokeshire. It covers an area of about 4 ha, and is about 400 m x 150 m in extent. Although it is not one of the largest fortified sites in Wales, it is certainly one of the most interesting and complex, for it incorporates a series of substantial stone embankments and also natural rock cliffs and scree slopes which were used as natural defences. There is a "village" of around 25 hut circles at the NE end of the site (the lee side), and on the windward side there are three enclosures separated by embankments. Beneath the scree slope on the eastern flank of the mountain there are two further massive defensive embankments.

Inside and outside the embankments there are terraced enclosures, paddocks, hut circles and rectangles, and small gardens. Some of the smaller structures were used as animal shelters and storage huts for fodder, grain, and other food supplies. As with other upland defended sites, the economy of the tribe which inhabited Carningli was probably a pastoral one. But the site is incredibly exposed, and it is quite possible that it was seasonally inhabited, just during the summer months. In the winter the tribal group and its animals would probably have moved down into the wooded lowlands of the Clydach or Nevern valley. The huts used as human dwellings would have been crude by comparison with those in the sheltered site of Castell Henllys; large communal huts with conical thatched roofs would never have survived here. So the roofs of the dwellings were most likely simple lattices of beams or branches, with supporting pillars, and with weatherproofing of animal skins, grassy turfs or thatch made from reeds or rushes.

When was the site abandoned? There are signs that some of the defensive embankments and walls have been slighted, so that may mean there was a conflict on the mountain and a sudden eviction or slaughter of the inhabitants, maybe in the first century AD. But there are records of intermittent occupation of the site by vagrants and other homeless people in the , and as recently as the Middle Ages.

Since the lower slopes of Carningli are covered with traces of Bronze Age settlement (Pearson 2001) there is a strong chance that some of the features of the hillfort itself are over 3,000 years old. Beneath the scree slope on the SE flank of the mountain, and inside the outermost defensive wall, there is something that looks suspiciously like a sub-Neolithic burial chamber -- this needs to be examined. The use of the mountain as a Neolithic burial site would not be surprising -- the famous cromlech of Pentre Ifan is not far away, and there are others in the Newport area.

Mynydd Carningli (often referred to as Angel Mountain) has long been considered as a sacred mountain (Miles, 1995), and it is still used for religious ritiuals (John, 2006).

The site is referred to in the Cadw Guide to Ancient and Historic Wales (1992) by Sian Rees, and in NP Figgis's "Prehistoric Preseli" (2001). There has never been a comprehensive excavation of the hillfort. The only plan is that of Hogg 1973 - it has been modified by Figgis, and again in recent research by Brian John, and the above detailed map of the site is now published for the first time.

References

John, B. 2006 "Martha Morgan's Little World" ISBN 0 905559 85 1John, B. 2008 "Carningli: Land and People" ISBN 9780 905559 889Miles, D. 1995 "The Ancient Borough of Newport in Pembrokeshire" ISBN 0-860-750949