Rhiwledyn, the little orme. I'm here for the Trig, but also to find out more about the local landscape. Curiosity often gets the better of me, and there's much to tempt the imagination here.
I could find no mention of an earthwork which I took to be the foundations of a roundhouse, well situated, and domestic in scale.
Of the three caves just beyond the enclosing walls, Letterbox Cave, sketched above, is most easily overlooked, in-spite of the fact that the escarpment to which it belongs dominates the aspect of the south-east approach with a beaming, crooked limestone smile, seen glowing in the morning sun.
My notes accompanying the sketch ran:
Enter on chest. Move stones blocking entrance. Mosquitoes for 3 metres (buzzing). Chimney at 5. Small chamber, kneeling. Sound of heart beating. Blue / green light when torch off, possibly after image. Bones. Digging in chamber, possibly rabbits. Red-ish ochre / umber, third tint. Micro-stalactites like the spines of small creatures. Carbonate bloom, luminous against glossy ochres. 2L plastic container. Impractical for domestic application. Private ritual function, presumably vision-quest.
The satellite imagery gives little indication of how vertiginous the slopes are, the approach to Printing Press Cave on short, wet grass, rolls away under foot, appearing impossibly spherical from above, before plunging into a scabious gorge, to the laughter of onlooking fulmars and gannets. Stories about this cave abound.
Reservations about the approach to printing press cave dissolve into disbelief when it comes to consider Rhiwledyn Cave on the sheer north face. Accessible only by the most dubious of paths; carved, it appears, not by sheep but shrews. Excavations of this cave have revealed the most finds of the three, it's forbidding position having presumably safeguarded the contents from casual vandalism. Contents which included "Some 518 bones, in addition to many hundreds of frog and toad bones [my italics], and more than 600 unidentifiable bone fragments... including bones belonging to at least four humans; a four year old, an eight year old, a nine year old and an adult." and a veritable shopping list of other species.
Ignoring my own advice to site one's self in the lee, I settled, after a week's sketching, on a standpoint overlooking this enigmatic enclosure, rather than in it. Looking towards the trig point, rather than from it, much could be made of this point by hands more capable than mine, I am sure. But for now, I'll keep on making choices, taking moments, thoughts and feelings, towards a months worth of marks on a board.
A prominent passage of WH Auden's In Praise of Limestone could have been artfully inserted a few points back.
They were right, my dear, all those voices were right,
And still are; this is not the sweet home that it looks,
Nor its peace the historical calm of a site
Where something was settled once and for all.
