Blacksmith's stones revisited

No one knows how Cerrig y Gof acquired its name  [compare with Wayland's Smithy]. It's a clutch of five stone tombs set in a tight circle within sight of sea and mountain. A numinous place to be buried. 

It's shame that a local antiquary in the early 19th century removed all the lids in order to dig below and didn't put them back. Maybe that would have required paying his labourers some more. (He didn't find much.)


They bide their time off serpentine
Green lanes, in fields, with railings
Round them and black cows; tall, pocked
And pitted stones, grey, ochre-patched
With moss, lodgings for lost spirits.

Sometimes you have to ask their
Whereabouts. A bent figure, in a hamlet
Of three houses and a barn, will point
Towards the moor. You will find them there,
Aloof lean markers, erect in mud.

Long Meg, Five Kings, Nine Maidens,
Twelve Apostles: with such familiar names
We make them part of ordinary lives.
On callow pasture-land
The Shearers and The Hunters stand.

Sometimes they keep their privacy
In public places: nameless slender slabs
Disguised as gate-posts in a hedge; and some,
For centuries on duty as scratching posts,
Are screened by ponies on blank uplands.

Search out the furthest ones, slog on
Through bog, bracken, bramble: arrive
At short granite footings in a plan
Vaguely elliptical, alignments sunk
In turf strewn with sheeps droppings;

And wonder whether it was this shrunk place
The guide-book meant, or whether
Over the next ridge the real chamber,
Accurate by the stars, begins its secret
At once to those who find it.

Turn and look back. You'll see horizons
Much like the ones that they saw,
The tomb-builders, millenniums ago;
The channel scutched by rain, the same old
Sediment of dusk, winter returning.

Dolerite, porphyry, gabbro fired
At the earth's young heart: how those men
Handled them. set on back-breaking
Geometry, the symmetries of solstice,
What they awaited we, too, still await.


Part of the poem Ancient Monuments  by John Ormond, a lesser known 20thC. Welsh poet.

(In 2011)