Bryn Celli Ddu

A Visit to Anglesey to Meet the Ancestors

I was again in Wales the land of my mother's and the birthplace of my maternal grandfather recently. I spent a lot of time as a kid in north Wales and last week I was there again to visit some of the numerous archaeological sites on the Isle of Anglesey.

Bryn Celli Ddu is a reconstructed passage grave set within a henge or ceremonial space. Its name means 'the mound in the dark grove' in Welsh. The term 'grove' immediately raises images of the sacred groves of the Celtic Druid past, but this tomb far predates the arrival of the Celts. The henge is Neolithic in origin and the passage grave we see here is from the British Bronze Age and is around 4,000 years old

Wikipedia sheds some light on Bryn Celli Ddu:-

"During the Neolithic period a stone circle and henge stood at the site. An area of burnt material containing a small human bone from the ear, covered with a flat stone, was recovered.

The stones were removed in the early Bronze Age when an archetypal passage grave was built over the top of the centre of the henge. A carved stone with a twisting, serpentine design stood in the burial chamber. It has since been moved to the National Museum of Wales and replaced with a replica standing outside.

An earth barrow covering the grave is a twentieth century restoration; the original was probably much bigger.

More Here    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryn_Celli_Ddu

I was left with the question 'why did the 20th century reconstruction of this passage grave not follow the original dimensions and why is it smaller than the original? I was reminded of the passage graves I visited in Orkney, most especially Maes Howe and there is possibly some good reasons to link these two sites according to the research.

'

Wikipedia again helps us here:-

"Norman Lockyer, who in 1906 published the first systematic study of megalithic astronomy, had argued that Bryn Celli Ddu marked the summer solstice. This was ridiculed at the time, but research by Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas in 1997- 98 showed this to be true.^[1] Knight and Lomas also claimed year round alignments allowed the site to be used as an agricultural calendar. Steve Burrow, curator of Neolithic archaeology at Amgueddfa Cymru (National Museum of Wales), has more recently supported the case for summer solstice alignment. This alignment links Bryn Celli Ddu to a handful of other sites, including Maes Howe and Newgrange, both of which point to the midwinter solstice. It has also been suggested that a feature similar to the 'lightbox' at Newgrange may be matched at Bryn Celli Ddu (Pitts, 2006). "

The passage that gives the passage grave its name.

Inside Bryn Celli Ddu a 4,000 year old structure

This pillar inside the tomb reflects light and gives something of a prismatic effect.

If it is indeed true that Bryn Celli Ddu had a lightbox like Newgrange or Maes Howe which was aligned to the Solstice Sun, then the effects of the light piecing this chamber and illuminating this beautiful stone would have been amazing, psychedelic even. The pillar today is lit by an opening at the rear of the chamber. 

This is the first post celebrating Anglesey Archaeology and our connections to ancestors from prehistory. I have more material agthered during this trip so be warned, there could be more on this subject before too long. One of the things that fascinates me about this time long before countries and nations existed is the universality of human societies and their connections before this connectedness was diluted by the nation state. This older purer form of being in the world still speaks to us of its understanding of man's place in the universe. While we cannot know the minds of the people that produced these monuments, I don't think they were very different to our own in any fundamental way.

From what little i know of this subject there does seem to be a process in the minds of the architects that we are on a journey and death marks the transition between being a person and being an ancestor, which were considered two very different ways of being. Making arrangements for this transition and communing between these two states of being seems to be a recurrent theme in the lives of the ancients wherever I have encountered them. That is the meaning that I have come to in my amateur dabblings in this fascinating field of study. Who were we before the beginnings of history? Who are we now? What will become of us? These are the questions to which I have devoted my entire life I think, I have been asking those questions for more than half a century or a grain of sand on the vast beach of human existence. But to put all of this in some sort of planetary (if not cosmic) perpective, if we visualise the existence of Planet Earth  (4.54 billion years) as an outstretched arm pointing to the future, the history of human existence would be wiped out with one pass of a nail file across the fingernail of that arms length outstretched pointing finger. 

We have happened in the twinkling of a star, the firing of a macrocosmic neuron.

Humanity bigs-itself-up because without it there would be no order, no pattern and no meaning in the universe if indeed that too is not an outmoded concept now the big Hadron Collider has suggested a multiverse might be more descriptive of nature. Arguments about human fallibility  may be used of course to critique this panhumanist position I have adopted to make sense of things, but these human minds have already declared themselves faulty and therefore have falsified their own hypotheses before they begin with their display of false modesty. The achievements of our ancestors were anything but modest and they occupy the same cultural space I think as aerospace technology, high energy physics or cosmology does today, they amazed themselves and each other by visioning a future and creating it, the same challenges lie before us now and it is to this age before history we must look to find our roots and perhaps even our bearings.

Humanity is one.