Maeni Hirion, Penmaenmawr
Would you come here on days of winter, cold
like this, crossing the haunch of Tal y Fan
from the shade of your valley
to watch the sky burn itself to sleep—
or was this only ever a place for dead people?
I count tonight the nights, like stars in millions
between us, imagining how you took your turn to turn
eyes closed, thrice three within the stones
hoping perhaps for warmth, some ease
a peace from endless fighting
all the usual things people wish for down the years—
an honest, less self-serving chieftain.
Maeni Hirion is a Bronze Age embanked stone circle that sits on the northern flank of the Carneddau mountains in North Wales. Known in English as The Druids’ Circle (literal translation from the Welsh, the long stones), the circle is one of a group of monuments which, according to CADW, may in the Bronze Age have been inter-related: tumuli, ring cairns, and two parallel lines of closely spaced stones that may or may not have formed the entrance to a sanctuary.
To the north of the circle, the town of Penmaenmawr and the sea; to the west, the Neolithic axe factory of Graig Llwyd and the massive hill fort of Braich y Dinas (later destroyed to make way for a quarry); to the east, the hill fort of Caer Lleion; to the south, Tal y Fan (one of the many peaks that form the waveline that is the Carneddau), and over the ridge the Conwy valley.
People have walked the hills above the circle for millennia. When the Romans came and laid a road from Caerhun and across the hills to Caernarfon, they found a ready path. Fifteen hundred years later, so too did the Central Energy Board — threading its pylons valley to valley — and now, so too, do I.
A steep climb from my house and I’m in the hills. The empty hills. These days we live in the valleys or on the sliver of land that separates mountains from sea and we leave the hills to sheep, to mountain bikers, and to walkers. During the Bronze Age life was lived in the sky — on the peaks, in the round huts that pepper the high landscape. Altitude aside though, I’m not sure that much separates we of the third millennium CE and those of the millennia before. That much is the substance of Maeni Hirion, Penmaenmawr. For all time’s ruptures, our concerns are human ones; we are no more and no less human than those who came before us and our concerns, I’d hazard, remain much the same.
Julian Brasington (2020) A double line of stones on the approach to Maeni Hirion
Maeni Hirion, Penmaenmawr, was first published in the anthology Christmas / Winter, Volume 3, Black Bough Poetry (2022).
CADW have responsibility for ancient monuments in Wales. Their series A Guide to the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Wales is a mine of information on archeological and architectural sites in Wales, from the prehistoric through to the medieval period. I have drawn on the Gwynedd volume in this post and also upon the resources available through Coflein.