Banc y Celyn, Brecknockshire - Royal Commission on the Ancient ...

Uplands Initiative – <strong>Banc</strong> y <strong>Celyn</strong> 20083.3.9 The significance of Medieval and Post Medieval settlement and agricultureThe widespread evidence for settlement or agricultural activity within the study clearlyshows that the identifiable human impact on the local landscape has been greatestduring the historic period.It is likely that many of the earthwork platforms and huts found in the area wereassociated with medieval or early post medieval pastoral activity. Where settlementsappear to be associated with enclosure and cultivation, they may represent early postmedievalencroachment onto the mountain wastes, as a population increase in thecountryside created more pressure on the land resource. However, as the features inquestion are invariably absent from early 19 th century maps of the area, their chronologyand function are impossible to assess on the basis of field observation alone.There are a number of characteristics relevant to the settlements of the study area thatseem to be of significance. The most obvious is the clustering of nearly all the desertedsettlement sites in the northern portion of the study area. Several explanations may beoffered as to why this should be so. It may be that the lower hills to the south were moreeasily accessible to the lowland communities of the Wye valley and therefore permanentherding stations or shepherding cottages were not needed. Alternatively, it may be thatthe equivalent sites in the southern half of the study area have been subsumed into thearea of enclosed land and became permanent farmsteads, such as Cwm Hafotty, BlaenLlwyn Ddu or Gwaun Ymryson (the latter two lie outside the study area), all of whichmay have originally stood on the open common. Evidence of their original settlementsmay have been lost after centuries of land improvement and farming. This is certainlypossible, as a similar phenomenon seemed to have occurred on the adjacent SENTADry Training Area lands to the east (Hall & Sambrook, 2008b).The settlement sites recorded in the NMR and regional HER are mainly earthworkplatforms and long huts. There is very little convenient building stone in the area,therefore timber, clom and reed thatch are likely to have been the main buildingmaterials until later post medieval times, all material which would have been locallyavailable. The exploitation of locally available resources in this manner was reflectedacross most upland regions in the past.Although the forms of the single longhouse and small number of long huts found in thearea compare with similar structures of medieval and post medieval date in other areas,the platforms recorded at <strong>Banc</strong> y <strong>Celyn</strong> show some diversity of form and location.Three platforms which had been recorded before the 2009 survey display the variationsthat can be found amongst this outwardly simple monument type. Cwmhindda PlatformIII (NPRN 247061) is a classic, bare, cross-contour platform, measuring up to 20mlong, by 7m wide. There seems to be little similarity between such an earthwork andthe Pant y Llyn Hill Platform II (NPRN 247046), which is cut almost parallel to thecontour and measures only 9m x 6m. Both of these platforms are associated with othersettlement features, but there is no evidence of cultivation in their vicinity and it mustbe presumed that they belong to purely pastoral settlement sites, possibly medievalhafod complexes. They are close together, being separated only by a hill and some200m, yet we cannot know if they were contemporary sites or in any way related. TheCwmhindda platform sits alongside a group of long huts and smaller platforms; Pant y63