Abstract
Two cairns of the bronze age, adjoining the village of Coity, near Bridgend, Glamorganshire, excavated by Sir Cyril Fox, director of the National Museum of Wales, and Lady Fox have made notable additions to the records of British archæology. The Simondston Cairn affords evidence of the earliest known use of coal as fuel in the British Isles. In the second, the Pond Cairn, was found a pit containing the remains of vegetation and grains of wheat and barley, believed to be the first food grains of the bronze age recorded in southern Britain. The excavations were described before the Society of Antiquaries of London by Sir Cyril Fox on March 31. The Simonds-ton Cairn is of the normal highland Early Bronze Age type and contains burials of two adults and a child, dating from about 1600 B.C. In the southern rim of the cairn were five cremation burials of about a generation later. It was in one of these that the traces of coal were identified. The nearest outcrop of coal is about a mile and a half away. The second cairn, Pond Cairn, lies half a mile away from Simonds-ton and is on a lower level. It is of a very unusual type both as regards its structure and the ritual acts involved in the construction. Near the centre was a rock-cut pit, probably dedicatory, which was filled with stones and contained the scattered burnt bones of a child. The primary burial was an urn of about 1300 B.C. which was covered with a heap of stones and a vertical-sided turf stack. A basin with a projection, phallic in plan, and lined with charcoal, fronted the urn. Around the turf stack was a continuous cairn ring, sixty feet in diameter, with an inner wall face and outer kerb. The space between the ring and the stack was scattered over with charcoal, and had been trodden hard, presumably in some ceremonial movement. Later the inner face of the ring was broken and the pit, to which reference is made above, was dug. It was covered with a pile of stones, linking the ring with the stack. The Pond Cairn is comparable with examples in Devon. With the secondary deposits at Simondston it probably represents an intrusion across the Severn Sea into the Glamorgan plain.
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Bronze Age Cairns in Glamorganshire. Nature 141, 636–637 (1938). https://doi.org/10.1038/141636d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/141636d0