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SJ 05612 37178 (GPS 56min) | Diameter 10.7 x 10.9m (Meas.) |
Visited August 2001 | No magnetic anomalies. |
A very steep walk from the nearest road,
this site is well worth the effort. With its location at the top of a hill, Moel
ty Uchaf has stunning panoramic views over the valley below and the circle
itself is also very attractive. Moel ty Uchaf "the High Bare Hill", is
a cairn circle of contiguously set stones in a good state of preservation. The
ring is broken at the SSE by what is assumed to be an original entrance, a
second, shorter, interruption occurs at the east presumably be due to loss of
stones.
We counted 41 stones in the ring and an extra stone inside the circle at the NE,
the stones do not appear to be graded, and the largest stone sits exactly at the
north. Burl describes a "finely preserved cist" at the centre of the
ring, but all we could find was a circular depression with signs of recent
digging. There is an outlying stone at the NNE, because of the steep slope of
the hill this stone is considerably lower than the circle which appears
silhouetted on the horizon from that location. The outlier has been
levered out of its stonehole very recently, and now lies a couple of metres
further down the hill. There does not seem to have been any digging in the hole,
and we could see no reason for someone to displace this stone.
On the other side of the ring from the outlier is a shallow valley in which
there is a low cairn SSE of the circle. This is so low, it is easy to miss, but
when we visited, the covering vegetation showed a prominent "cropmark"
colour change which made is stand out. The cairn is circular and has a
depression at its centre, "much white quartz" is said to have been dug
from it. About 40m east of the cairn is a jumble of large stones that made us
wonder if they had once been another megalithic structure, now destroyed and its
remnants piled here.