Crymych, Pembrokeshire There’s a spaciousness, an atmosphere about Preseli that enchants
Green paths through heather, low sun picking out tints of its late flowering, led to the ramparts of Foel Drygarn. This easternmost top of Mynydd Preseli is a rewarding objective for short winter days. It only reaches 363 metres above sea level, but geographical and historical texture compensate for lack of height. Three huge, ruined, late bronze age cairns lie within its defensive hilltop enclosure. The dragon-crest tor rising from moist haze westerly is Carn Goedog, whence came the speckled dolerite menhirs of Stonehenge.
The Golden Road – an ancient ridgeway from Crymych to the Gwaun valley – faded into distant dove-grey, slipped across low ridges that terminate in successive fine headlands along the north Pembrokeshire coast. There’s a spaciousness, an atmosphere about Preseli that enchants. I offered prayers of thanksgiving to the Reverend Parri Roberts and the poet Waldo Williams, who successfully resisted postwar military designs on 16,000 acres of this prime landscape for more of the training areas that blight so much of Britain. “We nurture souls in these areas,” Roberts wrote; and through his efforts Preseli does so still.
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