a bit of digging

You bear, you rider and ruler of many, and guider of the chariot which is the receptacle of the bear. We are being introduced to Cynlas Goch, 6th Century King of Rhos, who’s dark age fortress, over foundations of an iron age settlement, once crowned this bryn. 

Bryn Euryn commands a strategic position at a pass on what has become the pan-european route E22, overlooking Nant Sempyr, literally, the valley of forever, which takes its name, more prosaically, from the legion of romans slaughtered there under the command of one Semperonius.

While we’re on toponymy, Bryn is the masculine form of the welsh for hill, Rhiw being the curvier, sort. Euryn is probably eponymous, as I am unable to effect a direct translation. possibly relating to Einion Yrth, (Einion the impetuous), King of Gwynedd and grandfather to our Cynlas Goch. (Blue-Hound the bloody). John Northall suggests that Bryn Euryn means Golden Hill. Much is made of the fact that the surrounding area, Dinerth, means fort (den / home / receptacle) of the bear, with reference to the above passage from Gildas’ On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain, in which Cynlas is compared to the rib-toothed second beast of the apocalypse (Dan. 7.5). 

Which is all very well. But no mention is made, anywhere I am able to find, of the spot chosen by me to represent this bryn. Observation, imagination and conjecture have free reign here. 

At the top of this hidden hanging valley, the dense, yearning vegetation opens out at the foot of an overhanging limestone cliff, sheltered from the prevailing wind and rain, a series of scarcely perceptible rectangular enclosures, terraced into the nape of this nant, like the plateau of some derelict, verdant baroque double staircase, peppered with weary moss clad limestone sentinels that might once have crashed through walls or roofs, continue their slow march towards the sea.

Evidence of recent occupation, the remains of a fire, empty deodorant bottles, a vestigial rope swing, and a broken bakelite cigarette case, betray the continued appeal of such places, and indicate that the topography may have been similarly utilised by people in the remote past, differing less than we are apt to imagine, from ourselves.