Yesterday, I went on a roadtrip with two of my MA Archaeology of Death and Memory students. After visiting Bryn Celli Ddu, we moved on to explore a different Neolithic monument to serve as a contrast to it in terms of heritage management and interpretation, but also in regards to its accessibility/location, form and lack of contemporary depositional practices. I’m referring to the Neolithic chambered tomb at Bodowyr: the subject of a blog-post here.

It also features on Megalithic.co.uk

There is little known about this monument and no recent excavations. It really does feel like an island of timelessness in a changing world. I don’t mean this in terms of the cliche that it is ‘unchanged’ since prehistory: of course it has changed. It’s a mess inside a fence! What I mean is that it has no heritage interpretation, no intervention. I know I wasn’t supposed to climb over the fence, but I just had to explore it: sorry Cadw!

So this brief post is again about all the absences. Heritage interpretation at Lligwy elsewhere on the island gives a good sense of the kind of monument that it might have been. Yet here there is nothing. Still, Bodowyr is a striking monument, isolated in a field within its rectangular fence, and with long-distance views to Snowdonia on a clear day.