# Parc le Breos Chambered Tomb

Burial chamber in Swansea, Wales

Parkmill, United Kingdom

Settlement · Tomb

## Story

• A partly restored early Neolithic chambered tomb in a limestone gorge at Parc le Breos on the Gower, also called Parc Cwm long cairn and the Giant's Grave.
• Built about 3900 BC, or about 5,850 to 6,000 years ago, and used for somewhere between 300 and 800 years.
• A wedge-shaped cairn with a bell-shaped forecourt, a narrow passage, and four side chambers, now roofless, held the bones of at least 40 people.
• Workmen found it in 1869 while digging for road stone. It was dug again in 1937 and in 1960 to 1961, and the dating was set out in 1998.
• The bones and teeth point to hunters or, more likely, herders rather than cereal farmers, and some passage samples are now thought to have been moved from the nearby cave in modern times.

## Visiting

Entry is free. The monument is open all year, from 1 April to 31 March, during reasonable daylight hours. Visitors should attend only during the set opening hours. Smoking is not allowed.
Dogs are allowed to enter. Appropriate footwear for the season must be considered, and visitors are not allowed to climb over or through guardrails.

## History

Parc le Breos Chambered Tomb, also called Parc Cwm long cairn and the Giant's Grave, is a partly restored Neolithic chambered tomb on the floor of a dry limestone gorge in Coed y Parc Cwm, on the Gower Peninsula. It was built in the early Neolithic, placed at about 3900 BC, at about 5,850 years before the present, and at about 6,000 years ago. A wider dating of this kind of cairn runs from about 4400 BC to 2900 BC, and the tomb stayed in use for a long span, given as between 300 and 800 years, or as long as 800 years from 3800 BC, or as little as 300 years.

The cairn is a wedge of local limestone, held by dry-stone revetments, with a south-facing bell-shaped forecourt, a narrow passage, and two pairs of side chambers. Its length is given as about 72 feet or 22 metres, as roughly 70 feet or 21 metres, and as 22.2 metres, tapering from about 13 metres, or 12.4 metres, at the south to about 6 metres, or 6.3 metres, at the north. The passage is about 6 metres long and about a metre wide. No capstone has been recorded, and the mound that once covered the chambers is gone, so the stone interior stands open.

The dead were placed in the four chambers. Bone from the chambers is weathered and gnawed, and is read as bodies left in the open until the flesh was gone, then brought in as parcels of bone. Bone from the passage was still partly joined and is read as a body placed in the tomb with the flesh on. The first count, in 1869, was 20 to 24 people, all but three of them adults, and later study raised the number to at least 40, including adults, adolescents, children, and infants.

The men were robust, with strongly developed legs, and the women were described as short and slight. Their protein came mostly from meat and from milk or blood, not from cereals and not from the sea, so they are read as hunters or, more likely, herders. Joshua Pollard notes that these men were particularly robust beside the women, and Julian Thomas reads tombs of this Severn-Cotswold kind as built on clearings that were already landmarks.

Workmen digging for road stone found the tomb in 1869, and John Lubbock and Hussey Vivian excavated it that year, thinking it was a round barrow. Glyn Daniel's excavation in 1937 identified it as a chambered long barrow, and he had coined the Cotswold–Severn group by that year.

Richard J. C. Atkinson excavated it again in 1960 and 1961, and Alasdair Whittle and Michael Wysocki published the dates and the bone study in 1998. After that dig the monument passed into state guardianship and was partly restored.

The gorge later lay inside a medieval deer park of about 2,000 acres, enclosed in the 1220s of the Common Era by John de Braose, Lord of Gower. Some animal bone is far older than the cairn, and one red deer bone dates to between 2750 and 2150 years Before Present, also given as 800 to 200 BC. Passage samples dated to the Late Pleistocene, the later Neolithic or Early Bronze Age, and the Iron Age are now thought to have come from Cat Hole Cave and to have been placed in the tomb in modern times, one record putting that reburial at about 1880.

## Photographs

- [Parc Cwm long cairn. — Daicaregos](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Parc_le_Breos%2C_Gwyr_yr_ogof_cathole.JPG)
- [Parc Cwm long cairn, Gower, elevated view — Daicaregos](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/16/Parc_Cwm%2C_Gwyr_-_elevated.JPG)
- [Parc le Breos Chambered Tomb — Daicaregos](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Parc_le_Breos%2C_Gwyr_y_cwrt_o%27r_dde.JPG)
- [Parc Cwm long cairn, Gower, site plan — Daicaregos](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9c/Cynllun_Parc_Cwm.jpg)
- [Parc Cwm long cairn site plan. Key: 1. Coursed, dry-stone kerb revettment. 2. Cairn of rocks and cobbles. 3. Sill. 4. Passageway. 5. Transept chamber. 6. — Beao](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Parc_Cwm_long_cairn_site_plan.svg)
- [Parc le Breos Chambered Tomb — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5c/Parc_le_Breos%2C_Gwyr_o%27r_de.JPG)
- [Parc le Breos Chambered Tomb — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3d/Parc_le_Breos%2C_Gwyr_o%27r_dwyrain.JPG)
- [Parc le Breos Chambered Tomb — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1e/Parc_le_Breos%2C_Gwyr.JPG)
- [Parc le Breos Chambered Tomb — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c3/Parc_le_Breos%2C_Gwyr_y_cwrt.JPG)
- [Parc le Breos Chambered Tomb — Wikimedia Commons](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Parc_le_Breos%2C_Gwyr_o%27r_gogleth.JPG)

## Sources

- [Parc Cwm long cairn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parc_Cwm_long_cairn) — Wikipedia
- [Parc le Breos Chambered Tomb](https://cadw.gov.wales/visit/places-to-visit/parc-le-breos-chambered-tomb) — Cadw
- [More about Parc le Breos Chambered Tomb](https://cadw.gov.wales/more-about-parc-le-breos-chambered-tomb) — Cadw
- [Parc Le Breos Burial Chamber](https://coflein.gov.uk/en/sites/93072) — Coflein
- [Parc le Breos Cwm Transepted Long Cairn: Date, Contents, and Context](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/proceedings-of-the-prehistoric-society/article/abs/parc-le-breos-cwm-transepted-long-cairn-gower-west-glamorgan-date-contents-and-context/FB5E5F398F2E045ED47A434D2A301093) — Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society
- [Skeletal remains from Parc le Breos Cwm and Cat Hole Cave: a case of mistaken identity](https://doi.org/10.5284/1142987) — Archaeology Data Service
- [Neolithic and Bronze Age human remains from Parc le Breos](https://museum.wales/collections/online/object/32e8e444-b754-36a2-8f79-f6f722ea9fa9/Neolithic--Bronze-Age-human-remains/) — Museum Wales
- [Parc le Breos Burial Chamber, Ilston](https://ancientmonuments.uk/130879-parc-le-breos-burial-chamber-ilston) — Cadw
- [Cat Hole Cave](https://geoguide.scottishgeologytrust.org/p/gcr02/gcr02_catholecave) — Scottish Geology Trust
- [Cadw monument names](https://www.gov.wales/cadw-monument-names-html) — Welsh Government
- [Alasdair Whittle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alasdair_Whittle) — Wikipedia
- [Francis Pryor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Pryor) — Wikipedia
- [Glyn Daniel](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glyn_Daniel) — Wikipedia
- [Joshua Pollard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Pollard) — Wikipedia
- [Julian Thomas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Thomas) — Wikipedia
- [Hunter-gatherer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter-gatherer) — Wikipedia
- [Before Present](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_Present) — Wikipedia
- [Common Era](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Era) — Wikipedia
- [Red Lady of Paviland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Lady_of_Paviland) — Wikipedia
- [Cathole Cave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathole_Cave) — Wikipedia
- [John de Braose](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_de_Braose) — Wikipedia
- [Cotswold-Severn Group](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotswold%E2%80%93Severn_Group) — Wikipedia
- [Richard J. C. Atkinson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_J._C._Atkinson) — Wikipedia
- [Henry Vivian, 1st Baron Swansea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Vivian,_1st_Baron_Swansea) — Wikipedia
- [John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Lubbock,_1st_Baron_Avebury) — Wikipedia
- [Doggerland](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doggerland) — Wikipedia
- [Neolithic Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_Revolution) — Wikipedia
- [Bell Beaker culture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Beaker_culture) — Wikipedia
- [Gower Peninsula](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gower_Peninsula) — Wikipedia
- [Cantre'r Gwaelod](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantre%27r_Gwaelod) — Wikipedia
- [Parc le Breos, Gwyr yr ogof cathole.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parc_le_Breos,_Gwyr_yr_ogof_cathole.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Parc Cwm, Gwyr - elevated.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parc_Cwm,_Gwyr_-_elevated.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Parc le Breos, Gwyr y cwrt o'r dde.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parc_le_Breos,_Gwyr_y_cwrt_o%27r_dde.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Cynllun Parc Cwm.jpg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cynllun_Parc_Cwm.jpg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Parc Cwm long cairn site plan.svg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parc_Cwm_long_cairn_site_plan.svg) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Parc le Breos, Gwyr o'r de.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parc_le_Breos,_Gwyr_o%27r_de.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Parc le Breos, Gwyr o'r dwyrain.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parc_le_Breos,_Gwyr_o%27r_dwyrain.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Parc le Breos, Gwyr.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parc_le_Breos,_Gwyr.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Parc le Breos, Gwyr y cwrt.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parc_le_Breos,_Gwyr_y_cwrt.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons
- [Parc le Breos, Gwyr o'r gogleth.JPG](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Parc_le_Breos,_Gwyr_o%27r_gogleth.JPG) — Wikimedia Commons

## Detailed history

Parc le Breos Chambered Tomb stands on the floor of a dry, narrow limestone gorge in Coed y Parc Cwm, on the Gower Peninsula, in the City and County of Swansea. It is also called Parc Cwm long cairn, and in Welsh carn hir Parc Cwm. The burial chamber is called Parc le Breos burial chamber, and in Welsh siambr gladdu Parc le Breos. Other names are the Long Cairn and the Giant's Grave. The name used for the monument in care is Parc le Breos Chambered Tomb, and the Welsh form of that name is Beddrod Siambr Parc le Breos. The place is also written Parc le Breos Cwm.

The mapped point is given as 51 degrees 35 minutes 18 seconds north and 4 degrees 6 minutes 45 seconds west, and as 51.5883 degrees north and 4.1126 degrees west, and again as 51.5883 degrees north and 4.1127 degrees west. A grid is given as SS 537 898, and a finer grid as SS 53730 89820. The easting is given as 253731 and the northing as 189835. The community is Ilston, also written Llanddinol. The traditional county is Glamorgan.

It lies about seven and a half miles, or 12 kilometres, west-south-west of Swansea, and it is also placed about eight miles, or 13 kilometres, west of Swansea, and about seven miles west-south-west of Swansea. It is about one and a quarter miles, or 2 kilometres, north of the Bristol Channel, and less than that distance from the south coast of Gower. The nearest village is Parkmill, about one mile, or 1.6 kilometres, to the south-east. The cairn is described as midway between Llanrhidian and Bishopston. It looks towards Oxwich Bay, 2 kilometres to the south. The floor of the gorge is about 50 feet, or 15 metres, above sea level, and the cairn is also placed at about 15 metres above Ordnance Datum.

The woodland around it, Coed y Parc, is given as about 500 acres, as about 2 square kilometres, and as about 200 hectares. It is a remnant of a medieval deer park. That park, Parc le Breos, was an enclosed area of about 2,000 acres, or 810 hectares, established in the 1220s of the Common Era by the Marcher Lord of Gower. It is also placed in about 1221 to 1232. The park is now mainly farmland. John de Braose was that lord. He was born in 1197 or 1198 and died on 18 July 1232. He was Lord of Bramber and Gower, and the Welsh called him Tadody, a name said to mean fatherless. His father was William de Braose and his mother was Maud de Clare. His grandparents, William de Braose and Maud de St Valery, were taken in 1210, during the reign of King John, and walled into a dungeon at Corfe Castle, where they starved. John de Braose was at first hidden on Gower. A nineteenth-century hunting lodge about 1,200 yards, or 1.1 kilometres, north-east of the cairn has been turned into a hotel and a place for pony trekking, and it carries the park's name. The woodland is owned and managed by Natural Resources Wales.

This is a partly restored Neolithic chambered tomb, a megalithic cromlech. One published date places the building at about 3900 BC. The building is also placed around 5,850 years before the present, and around 5850 on the scale called Before Present, during the early Neolithic. Another account says it was built around 6,000 years ago. A description of the monument as a chambered long cairn dates that class, and this cairn with it, to the early Neolithic, about 4400 BC to 2900 BC. Samples show the tomb in use for between 300 and 800 years. One account says the use lasted as long as 800 years from 3800 BC, or as little as 300 years. The radiocarbon dates are also read as placing the long cairn in the later part of the earlier Neolithic, with a fairly long span of time over which the mortuary deposits accumulated.

Before Present, often shortened to BP, is a scale used in archaeology and geology. Because the present moves, the usual zero is 1 January 1950. The abbreviation has also been read, after the fact, as Before Physics, meaning the time before nuclear weapons tests changed the carbon isotopes in the air. Radiocarbon dating was first used in 1949, and from 1954 the year 1950 was taken as the origin of the scale, tied to a standard of oxalic acid. Uncalibrated radiocarbon years are not the same as calendar years, because the amount of carbon-14 in the air has not been constant. Some writers keep the term Before Present for radiocarbon estimates and prefer another unit for dates reached in other ways. Some archaeologists write uncalibrated ages in lowercase. The dates given for this cairn appear both as calendar years and as years Before Present, and both forms are kept here as they were published.

Common Era, shortened to CE, and Before the Common Era match Anno Domini and the years before it, year for year. The phrases were used so that a year number need not call Jesus Lord. Dionysius Exiguus, around the year 525, numbered years from the incarnation as he dated it. Bede used that numbering in England in 731, and he counted years before the year 1 backwards, with no year zero. The Latin for a vulgar, meaning ordinary, era may go back to Johannes Kepler in 1615, and the English phrase Common Era appears at least as early as 1708. The deer park belongs to the thirteenth century of the Common Era. The tomb belongs to the early Neolithic, several thousand years before that era's year 1.

From the end of the last ice age, between 12,000 and 10,000 years Before Present, Mesolithic hunter-gatherers began to move north from central Europe. The land that became Wales was free of glaciers by about 10,250 years Before Present. Sea levels were much lower. The shallower parts of the North Sea were dry, and the east coast of present-day England was joined to the coasts of present-day Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands by the land called Doggerland. That land made a British peninsula of the European mainland. The post-glacial rise of the sea separated Wales and Ireland and formed the Irish Sea. Doggerland was drowned by the North Sea, and by 8000 years Before Present the peninsula had become an island. Doggerland is the name generally used for that drowned ground in the Late Pleistocene and the Early Holocene. After the ice retreated, the exposed land ran from the east coast of Great Britain to northern France, Belgium, the Netherlands, north-western Germany, and the Danish peninsula of Jutland, and between 10,000 and 7,000 years ago that land was going under. At the beginning of the Neolithic, about 6000 years Before Present, the sea in the Bristol Channel was still about 33 feet, or 10 metres, lower than it is today.

Hunter-gatherer is the name for a person, also called a forager, whose community gets most or all of its food by hunting, fishing, and gathering plants, seeds, and fungi. Hunting and gathering is treated as the subsistence of human societies from the appearance of Homo erectus about 1.8 million years ago, and of Homo sapiens from about 300,000 years ago. It is said to cover at least 90 percent of human history. Prehistoric bands are described as several families, a few dozen people, often fully or semi-nomadic, in contrast with the larger settled farming societies that followed. They are described as generally egalitarian, with sharing and a resistance to hierarchy, though gender roles and some division of labour existed, and men and women often both hunted and gathered. Diets varied with climate and with access to water, and fat was a critical nutrient. In western Eurasia, farming communities replaced hunter-gatherers more gradually than in some other regions, and dense forest remained a refuge until societies of the Bronze Age and the Iron Age overcame it. That general picture is the wider setting. It is not a census of the people later buried in this gorge.

John Davies has theorised that the story of the drowning of Cantre'r Gwaelod, and tales in the Mabinogion of the water between Wales and Ireland being narrower and shallower, may be distant folk memories of the rising sea. Cantre'r Gwaelod, also called Cantref y Gwaelod, is a legendary sunken kingdom said to have occupied fertile land between Ramsey Island and Bardsey Island, in what is now Cardigan Bay, west of Wales. It has been called a Welsh Atlantis. The legend's own setting is that bay, not the Bristol Channel beside Gower.

The warmer climate changed the plants and animals of Great Britain and encouraged dense forest over 80 to 90 percent of the island. Around 6000 years Before Present, human life in north-west Europe changed from the Mesolithic, the Middle Stone Age of hunting and gathering, to the Neolithic, the New Stone Age of agriculture and settlement. This change is called the Neolithic Revolution, also the First Agricultural Revolution: a wide shift, in many cultures of Afro-Eurasia, from hunting and gathering to agriculture and settlement, which made a larger population possible. Settled communities could watch plants grow and domesticate them. Archaeological evidence places the domestication of plants and animals in separate parts of the world, beginning in the Holocene 11,700 years ago. John Davies notes that people living in north-west Europe could not have developed that transformation on their own, because neither the grain for the crops nor the animals suitable for domestication are native there. Genetic studies conclude that the cultural changes were brought to Britain by farmers migrating from the European mainland. One of those studies, published in 2009, used radiocarbon evidence to argue that migrants introduced farming. A news account of related genetic work, in 2010, said that most British men descend from ancient farmers.

Julian Thomas has challenged the idea of one clean break. He was born in 1959 in Epsom. He studied archaeological science at Bradford, then took a master's degree in 1982 and a doctorate in 1986 at Sheffield, on social and economic change in the Neolithic of Wessex and the upper Thames. He lectured at Lampeter from 1987 to 1993 and at Southampton from 1994 to 2000, and he has been professor of archaeology at Manchester since April 2000. His book, first published in 1991 as Rethinking the Neolithic and revised in 1999 as Understanding the Neolithic, argued against the conventional picture of a single Neolithic Revolution in which hunter-gatherers in Great Britain simply became farmers. He drew on social theory, anthropology, and critical hermeneutics. He has been vice president of the Royal Anthropological Institute since 2007, and he is a former secretary of the World Archaeological Congress. From 1994 to 2002 he directed excavations of Neolithic and later prehistoric sites in Dumfries and Galloway. Since 2003 he has been a co-director of the Stonehenge Riverside Project, with Mike Parker Pearson, Colin Richards, Chris Tilley, Kate Welham, and Joshua Pollard. That project treated Stonehenge as part of a wider ceremonial landscape of the third and early second millennia BC, focused on the River Avon. In that work a large settlement of Neolithic houses was found at Durrington Walls, and a henge and stone circle on the west bank of the Avon was given the name Bluestonehenge. Julian Thomas has speculated that the twenty-five bluestones at Stonehenge, brought from the Preseli Hills about 250 kilometres, or 160 miles, away in Pembrokeshire, had stood in a circle inside a henge at that riverside site for about 500 years before they were taken down and moved to Stonehenge around 2500 BCE. None of that fieldwork is this gorge. What he says about the Severn-Cotswold tombs is that they were built on ground that had already gained some significance. He theorises that the chosen places may have been very long-lived woodland clearances, already landmarks and meeting places. Excavations of the group are said to show that the tombs stood on such ground.

Joshua Pollard, in a contribution to a history of Wales, notes that not all Neolithic communities joined the simultaneous marked transformations in material culture, ideology, and technical practice known as the Neolithic Revolution. He was born in May 1968, took his first degree and his doctorate at Cardiff, and is a professor of archaeology at Southampton and a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London. His fieldwork has centred on deposition, monuments, and landscape in the Neolithic of Britain and north-west Europe. From 1997 to 2003 the Longstones Project, in the Avebury region, looked for the sequence of later Neolithic building and led to the rediscovery of a second megalithic avenue, the Beckhampton Avenue, leading from the Avebury henge, and of an unusual later Neolithic enclosure. The same project examined the West Kennet Avenue, Falkner's Circle, and the Avebury Cove. He has worked on the Stonehenge Riverside Project since 2004. In 2004 the work at Durrington Walls explored the south-eastern entrance and the relationship between that henge and the River Avon. He was seen on a television dig in 2017, and from 2016 to 2021 he worked on a project called Living with Monuments, with Mark Gillings. A book with Alasdair Whittle and Caroline Grigson, in 1999, was about the Windmill Hill causewayed enclosure. Another, with Mark Gillings, Peterson, and Wheatley, in 2008, was about fieldwork on the Avebury monuments from 1997 to 2003. His book on Lodge Hill Camp at Caerleon, and the hillforts of Gwent, appeared in 2006. That Avebury and Stonehenge work is not this gorge. What he writes about the people of this cairn belongs with the bones: the men were particularly robust beside the women, and the diet was not that of cereal farmers.

Francis Pryor has described monuments of this kind as places where people met to socialise, to meet new partners, to acquire fresh livestock, and to exchange ceremonial gifts. He was born on 13 January 1945. He attended Temple Grove School and Eton, then studied archaeology at Trinity College, Cambridge, and gained a doctorate in 1985. He is known for the discovery and excavation of Flag Fen, a Bronze Age site near Peterborough, and for television work that included the series Time Team. With his first wife, Sylvia Page, he spent a year as a technician at the Royal Ontario Museum. He returned to Britain in 1970, and between 1970 and 1978 he alternated between digs ahead of the new town at Peterborough and writing in Canada. His second wife, Maisie Taylor, is a specialist in prehistoric wood, and they worked together at Flag Fen. He published Flag Fen: Prehistoric Fenland Centre in 1991, a final monograph on the basin in 2001, and in 2005 a revision that rejected the earlier idea of a lake village. He was a founding member of the Institute of Field Archaeologists in 1982. He received an MBE in the 1999 Birthday Honours for services to tourism. In the series Britain BC in 2003 and Britain AD in 2004 he argued that historic cultural change in Britain came by cultural adoption among a population that stayed genetically the same, rather than by large-scale migration. That argument stands beside, and does not erase, the genetic studies that read farming as the arrival of migrant farmers. The meeting-place reading is the one applied to these cromlechs. After he left full-time field archaeology he farmed sheep on about 40 acres of fenland pasture in Lincolnshire, and he has said that this work made him feel a connection with Bronze Age people who also lived by keeping animals. Flag Fen is a different monument, in the fens, not on Gower.

The cromlech at Parc le Breos Cwm is one of 120 to 130 sites placed in the long barrow category called Severn-Cotswold or Cotswold-Severn. The Cotswold–Severn Group is a series of long barrows put up in western Great Britain in the Early Neolithic. Around 200 known long barrows are counted in the Cotswold–Severn region, and an unknown number of others were probably destroyed before anyone recorded them. The two figures are not the same count. One is the number of sites identified in the named group of tombs. The other is the number of known long barrows in the region. Glyn Daniel coined the idea of the Cotswold–Severn group by 1937. The long barrows belong to a broader tradition around the Atlantic, from south-east Spain to southern Sweden and including the British Isles. About 40,000 long barrows are said to survive from the Early Neolithic across Europe. They are not the oldest known stone structures. They are predated by Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey. They are described as the oldest widespread tradition of building in stone. Frances Lynch has called them the oldest built structures in Europe to survive. Another account calls the Severn-Cotswold cairns the oldest surviving examples of architecture in Great Britain, and says this cairn was built about 1,500 to 1,300 years before either Stonehenge or the Great Pyramid of Giza was completed.

As the name implies, these cairns are concentrated mainly east of the River Severn, in and around the Cotswolds, in present-day England. Similar structures are identified in south-east Wales, between Brecon, Gower, and Gwent, and at Capel Garmon near Betws-y-Coed in Conwy, in north Wales, and at Wayland's Smithy in Oxfordshire and at Avebury in Wiltshire. Parc Cwm long cairn is one of six chambered tombs known on Gower and one of 17 in what is commonly called Glamorgan. The setting of this one is described as isolated and hidden, and the density of monuments in south Wales is described as apparently low.

The shared traits of the tradition are an elongated trapezoidal or wedge shape, up to 328 feet or 100 metres long, a cairn of deliberately placed stones, a dry-stone revetment that also defines a horned forecourt at the widest end, huge capstones on orthostats, and a chamber or chambers reached, after the cairn was finished, by a gallery. Earlier tombs in the group had multiple chambers set at the sides, or pairs of transept chambers off a central passage. Later tombs, chambered at the end, had a single chamber. Massive constructions of the dolmen kind, with a free-standing structure and a sloping capstone, are said to have needed a large labour force, up to 200 people, which would suggest large communities nearby. That figure is a general estimate for such building. It is not a counted gang at this gorge. No long barrows with wooden internal structures have been identified in south-east Wales, perhaps because long barrows of that kind were usually built where there was no suitable stone. A later distinction says that a long barrow has a long earthen mound and a wooden interior, whereas a chambered tomb, though also covered by a long mound, has internal chambers of stone.

The cairn here is aligned north to south, and its long axis is also given as 5 degrees west of due south. It is a mound of local rocks and cobbles, mainly limestone, held by two coursed dry-stone kerbs described as of a fine standard. The inner wall used a heavier stone. The schedule account says two parallel dry-stone revetments, 0.8 metres apart. The outer revetment survives to a height of 0.3 metres at the northern end and rises to about a metre at the southern end. The shape is a wedge, or a trapezoid. The length is given as about 72 feet, or 22 metres, as roughly 70 feet, or 21 metres, as about 22 metres, and as 22.2 metres. The southern width is given as 43 feet, or 13 metres, and as about 13 metres, and the widest part is also given as 12.4 metres. The northern end is given as about 20 feet, or 6 metres, as about 6 metres, and as 6.3 metres. The sides and the northern end are described as virtually straight.

At the entrance the kerbs sweep inward into a pair of deep protrusions, or horns, and form a narrow bell-shaped forecourt facing south. The forecourt is also given as about 2 metres wide, recessed to a depth of about 4.5 metres, between convex terminals of slightly unequal length. The wall at the front, on the right, is missing or has collapsed, and the rubble has tumbled out, leaving an orthostat exposed that had been covered. A straight central passage, or gallery, runs north to south from the forecourt. It is given as 21 feet, or 6 metres, long and 3 feet, or 1 metre, wide, as about 6 metres long and 1 metre wide, and as 6.2 metres long and 1 metre wide. Thin limestone slabs, the orthostats, line each side, set on end, up to 5 feet or 1.5 metres high, with coursed dry-stone filling the gaps. The gallery uprights are said to reach 1.5 metres, while those of the chambers are generally less than 1 metre. The tomb is built of upright limestone slabs with fine dry walling in the irregular spaces between them.

Two pairs of rectangular transept chambers lead off the passage. They average 5 and a half feet, or 1.6 metres, east to west, by 3 and a quarter feet, or 1.0 metre. An account of 1886 gives the chambers as 6 feet by 2 feet. The schedule account says the opposing chambers average 1.6 metres in length and 1 metre in width, and that the four chambers form transepts at the end of the gallery at its midpoint. Each chamber except the south-west one has shallow limestone sillstones at its entrance. The chambers would once have been covered by one large capstone or by several smaller ones. The earth covering and the upper part of the cromlech have been removed, so the passage and the side chambers are fully exposed. There is no record that a capstone was ever found, and no trace of the covering slabs has been recorded. The condition is also called nearly intact, and the tomb is called one of the best preserved in this part of Wales. Both can be said of a stone interior that has lost its mound and its roof and has been partly restored.

Richard J. C. Atkinson believed that this cairn, unusually among cairns of the Severn-Cotswold tradition, had been built beside a stream that now flows underground. He noted that the stones on the eastern side showed marked signs of erosion and rounding by silt-laden flood water.

The human remains had been placed in the two pairs of chambers that lead from the passage. Corpses may have been laid in nearby caves until they decomposed, and the bones then moved into the tomb. That treatment of a body left in the open until the flesh is gone is the practice discussed for this tomb. A variety of mortuary practices is evident, and the ordering of skeletal parts looks deliberate. Cremated human remains were placed only in the front right chamber, the south-east one, where women and men and all age ranges were represented. That chamber held nearly three times as many individuals as each of the other chambers. The other chambers held the representative groups except younger children and infants. Bones from the chambers show weathering and biting and gnawing by animals. That is read as evidence that the corpses lay exposed, decomposed, and were brought in as defleshed parcels of bone, not as bulky bodies. Bones from the passage were partly articulated and show no animal scavenging, which is read as evidence that at least one of those bodies was placed in the tomb still fleshed. The 1998 analysis contrasts the prior exposure of the remains found in the chambers with the remains found in the passage.

The dig of 1869 found human bones much broken and in no regular arrangement. They were thought at first to have been disturbed by repeated access or by later burials, and they were counted as 20 to 24 people, all but three of them adults. Such counts were commonly based on the number of skulls or of mandibles. Later analysis has given at least 40 individuals, and one summary says over 40. The public account of the tomb says the bones of at least 40 separate individuals. Another says an estimated minimum of 40. They include male and female adults, adolescents, children, and infants, and the bones are disarticulated remains rather than complete skeletons. In the early Neolithic of Britain, from about 6400 to about 5850 years Before Present, few human remains survive, though they are comparatively well preserved in the Black Mountains, also called Mynydd Du, on Gower, and in the Vale of Glamorgan, also called Bro Morgannwg, where up to 50 people, men, women, and children, have been buried in each cromlech. The figure of up to 50 is that regional comparison. It is not a second count for this tomb.

Where stature could be estimated, the men were called big men. The report of 1869 notes males of gigantic proportions, and the women as short and gracile. Joshua Pollard notes that the males analysed from this cairn were particularly robust when set beside the females. Musculoskeletal analysis showed a marked difference between the sexes. The men had greater development of the leg muscles, possibly from hunting or from herding, which confirms the difference between the sexes seen in earlier study of the same remains. No such variation was noticeable in the remains from the Tinkinswood burial chamber, in the Vale of Glamorgan. The variation in the markers of muscular stress may indicate a mobile life for at least some of the men buried here.

Stable isotope analysis shows that plant foods, including cereals, formed only a small part of their dietary protein. Most of the protein came from animals, that is from meat and from milk or blood, and none of it came from the sea. The diet of the sampled group is described as terrestrial and mainly oriented toward meat. Teeth were examined for arrested development and for decay. Arrested development would imply times when food was short, which could mean failed harvests. Decay would imply shortage, or a diet high in carbohydrate, or a diet of softer cooked meat, or both. The teeth showed neither decay nor arrested development, even where the wear was considerable. That is read as a life that did not depend on farming cereals. A bone report of 1887 notes the good condition of the teeth. Alasdair Whittle and Michael Wysocki noted a slight presence of tartar, and that only one tooth had been lost before death, a mandibular incisor. From the bones and the teeth they conclude that the people who were to be buried here either went on with hunting and gathering or, more likely, lived a pastoral life of herding, rather than an agrarian life of growing cereals.

Among the human remains are the bones of eight dogs, a cat, a red deer, pig, sheep, and cattle. The finds of 1869 included teeth of deer and of swine, and sherds of plain pottery of the Western Neolithic. There are not enough data to show how the animals got into the tomb. One bone of red deer has been radiocarbon dated to between 2750 and 2150 years Before Present, and the same bone is also given as 800 to 200 BC, so at least some bone entered long after the place had been deserted. Other bones gave dates of 6640 to 6410 BC and of 11050 to 10200 BC. The second of those ranges is from the end of the Ice Age. It has been speculated that these bones came from Cat Hole Cave, which overlooks the site. The two caves near the cromlech have been suggested as places where corpses were laid until the flesh was gone, and where, when human bones were collected for burial in the tomb, other bones already in the cave were gathered up as well, without that being intended. The 1998 account also allows that very old animal bone from the caves may have been brought in on purpose, and it allows a secondary reuse of the passage.

New evidence treats a particular set of those samples differently. Samples of human and animal remains dated to the Late Pleistocene, to the Late Neolithic through the Early Bronze Age or the Beaker period, and to the Iron Age, recovered from the central passage during the excavation of the 1960s, are now thought likely to have come from the nearby Cat Hole Cave and to have been deposited at the tomb in modern times. A museum record of bone from that same passage excavation says it is now established that these remains were dug from Cats Hole Cave and reburied at Parc le Breos Cwm about 1880. The spelling Cats Hole is the one used in that record. The record names the excavator as Professor Richard Atkinson of Cardiff, and dates his digging to 1960 and 1961. This modern deposition is a separate claim from the Neolithic practice of moving bone after the flesh had gone. It concerns the passage samples that gave those dates outside the early use of the tomb. It is not, by itself, a new count of the people in the chambers.

At the entrance of the forecourt, finds were recorded in groups. There was flint debitage, there were lithic cores, and there was a bladelet, both burnt and unburnt. There was a leaf-shaped arrowhead, burnt. There were pieces of quartz, and pieces of stalactite that are now missing. There were sherds of Neolithic pottery, and fragments of cremated bone. Atkinson speculated that the stalactite came from Cat Hole Cave. Alasdair Whittle and Michael Wysocki note that cave, together with Tooth Hole cave, as a possible source of the quartz as well.

Cat Hole Cave, also called Cathole Cave and Cathole Rock Cave, is a steep limestone outcrop about 200 yards, or 180 metres, north of the cromlech, along the valley and near the top of the gorge, about 50 feet, or 15 metres, from the valley floor. Another account places the cave about 250 metres from the tomb, at about 30 metres above Ordnance Datum, and about 10 metres above the floor of the dry valley. A grid given for the cave in that account is SS 5553 8900. The cave is a deep triangular fissure, narrowing toward the top, with two entrances and a natural platform outside the larger one. One account gives the largest chamber a maximum width of about 40 feet, or 12 metres. The cave was used as a shelter by bands of Mesolithic hunters and as a Neolithic ossuary. The first excavation, in 1864, is summarised as having produced finds only from the Mesolithic period to the medieval period. The first known digging is also credited to Wood in 1864, mainly inside the cave and at the mouth of the larger entrance. Charles McBurney, writing in 1959, said that in the post-glacial period the cave was much used by Mesolithic hunters. John Campbell's excavation in 1977 confirmed that conclusion. Charles Brian Montagu McBurney was born on 18 June 1914 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and died on 14 December 1979. He was a British-American archaeologist who worked for most of his life in England. He entered King's College, Cambridge, in 1933, and he studied under Dorothy Garrod.

An excavation in 1984 by Aldhouse-Green produced the earliest finds from the cave, two tanged points that may date to about 28,000 years Before Present. That is an interglacial in the Late Pleistocene, roughly of the same broad age as the Red Lady of Paviland. That burial was found in a cave between Port Eynon and Rhossili, about eight miles, or 13 kilometres, west of Cathole Cave. One account dates the Red Lady to about 29,000 years Before Present and calls the burial the oldest known human burial in Great Britain. The account of the skeleton itself dates it to about 34,000 years Before Present, or about 32,000 BCE. William Buckland found the bones in 1823 in Goat's Hole, also called Paviland Cave, and believed them to be a woman of the Roman period. William Sollas examined the cave in 1912, found flint arrowheads and tools, and concluded that the skeleton was male, a hunter of the Upper Palaeolithic, also described as a warrior. The bones had been dyed in red ochre. The Welsh name is given as Dynes Goch Pafiland, with quotation marks around the word for a woman. The two dates, about 29,000 and about 34,000 years Before Present, are both published. Neither is replaced here by a figure that neither account gives.

Rock art thought to show a reindeer was found on the back wall of Cathole Cave in September 2010. The engraving measures about 15 by 11 centimetres and has been radiocarbon dated to 14,505, plus or minus 560, years Before Present. George Nash, the archaeologist who found it, called it the oldest rock art in the British Isles, if not in north-western Europe. That engraving is in the cave. It is not cut on the cairn.

Tools of the Late Glacial from the cave date to about 12,000 years Before Present. They include flint blades known as Cheddar points, smaller bladelets known as Cresswell points, scrapers, burins or lithic flakes, awls of flint and of bone, and a bone needle. Flint rarely occurs in Wales except in drifts, or as small pebbles on beaches, so flint had to be brought to Gower from areas now known as southern or eastern England, or from County Antrim, either as finished tools or as incomplete or unworked nodules. At the same level were remains of red fox, Arctic fox, brown bear, tundra vole, and possibly reindeer. Those animals are evidence for the climate of about 12,000 years Before Present. Other animal remains from nineteenth-century digging in the cave, which may be older than those Late Glacial finds, include mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, red deer, and giant deer. A list of what Wood's collection held, later itemised from the natural history collection in London, adds two human skulls, numerous flint cores and flakes, a stone hammer, a bronze celt, pottery, shells of limpet, oyster, and whelk, and remains of bear, fox, hyaena, wild cat, Irish deer, reindeer, red deer, horse, woolly rhinoceros, vole, mammoth, sheep or goat, and pig. A gnawed bone and a worked bone from his finds were held in Swansea, in the museum of the Royal Institution of South Wales. The flints were later assigned to the Upper Palaeolithic, either to the Upper Aurignacian or to the Magdalenian, and a resemblance was noted to the tools from Paviland. The human skulls from the cave were said to have lain near the surface, and so were not thought likely to be of an early date. The animal list was read as essentially a cold assemblage of the Pleistocene, even though it also contained some more recent species. Several finds of the Bronze Age also come from the cave: a bronze socketed axe, two human skeletons, and sherds from burial urns and other vessels. Archaeologically the cave has been called the most important of the inland caves of Gower. None of these objects from the cave is a find from the chambers of the cairn. The later argument is only that some bone placed in the tomb's passage had first lain in the cave.

Llethryd Tooth Cave, or Tooth Hole cave, is an ossuary of the Bronze Age about 1,500 yards, or 1.4 kilometres, north-north-west of the cromlech. D. P. Webley and J. Harvey excavated it in 1962. They found the disarticulated remains of six people, dated to the Early Bronze Age or to the Beaker culture. The Bell Beaker culture, also called the Bell Beaker complex or phenomenon, is named for an inverted-bell drinking vessel used at the start of the European Bronze Age. The German name Glockenbecher was coined by Paul Reinecke, and John Abercromby introduced the English name Bell Beaker in 1904. The culture arose as early as 2800 BCE. It lasted until about 1650 BCE in some regions and disappeared as early as 2300 BCE in others. In Britain it is placed from about 2450 BCE, with the appearance of single graves, until as late as 1800 BCE. Other finds from Tooth Cave, now held by the national museum in Cardiff, include pottery of the collared urn, flaked knives, a scraper, flint flakes, a bone spatula, a needle, and a bead, and bones of domesticated animals, including cat and dog. Alasdair Whittle and Michael Wysocki note that this period of occupation at the cave may be significant for the cairn, because it is broadly contemporary with the secondary use of the tomb. The six people are the dead of that cave. They are not an addition to the people counted in the cairn.

Workmen digging for road stone discovered the cairn in 1869. John Lubbock and Hussey Vivian excavated it that year, believing it to be a round barrow. John Lubbock, who became the 1st Baron Avebury, was born on 30 April 1834 and died on 28 May 1913. He was an English banker, a Liberal politician, a philanthropist, and a scientist. He coined the terms Palaeolithic and Neolithic for the Old and New Stone Ages. He helped to establish archaeology as a discipline, he took part in debates about evolutionary theory, and he introduced the first law for the protection of archaeological and architectural heritage in the United Kingdom. Henry Hussey Vivian, who became the 1st Baron Swansea, was born on 6 July 1821 at Singleton Abbey in Swansea and died on 28 November 1894. He was the eldest son of John Henry Vivian and Sarah, daughter of Arthur Jones of Reigate. He was educated at Eton, studied metallurgy in Germany and France, and entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1839. He managed and then partnered in the copper-smelting firm Vivian and Sons, and he developed by-products of the smelting. Between May 1882 and June 1893 he was Sir Hussey Vivian. An 1887 mention of the cave remains is credited to Vivian. After the dig of 1869, most of the human remains from the cairn were reburied in clay pots beneath their original places. Some are held in the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, together with the animal remains and the pottery. The whereabouts of the remainder are unrecorded. The schedule account says that after a burial chamber was exposed in 1869 the whole of the central structure of the cairn was excavated and planned, and that human remains and the remains of ritual and of funerary activity were discovered and removed.

An excavation led by Glyn Daniel in 1937 identified the site as a chambered long barrow. Glyn Edmund Daniel was born on 23 April 1914 at Lampeter Velfrey, a small village in Pembrokeshire between Narberth and Whitland, and he died on 13 December 1986. He was the only child of John Daniel, the village schoolmaster. At five he moved with his parents to Llantwit Major in the Vale of Glamorgan. He attended Barry County School for Boys, held a state scholarship and a Glamorgan county scholarship, spent a year on geology at Cardiff and on the organ at Llandaff Cathedral, and in 1932 went to St John's College, Cambridge, first for geography and then for archaeology and anthropology. He took a first and stayed at St John's for the rest of his academic life. In the Second World War he interpreted aerial photographs for the air reconnaissance unit at Medmenham, and in 1942 he was sent to Delhi to lead photographic interpretation for the South-East Asian theatre, rising to wing commander. A year after the war he married Ruth Langhorne, who had served with him. He presented a broadcast series, Buried Treasure, in 1954 to 1956, and he was the host of the game Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, often with Mortimer Wheeler. He was named Television Personality of the Year in 1955. He became Disney Professor of Archaeology in 1974, and he edited the journal Antiquity from 1958 to 1985. His main subject was the chamber tombs of the Neolithic. The Prehistoric Chamber Tombs of England and Wales appeared in 1950, The Megalith Builders of Western Europe in 1958, and The Prehistoric Chamber Tombs of France in 1960. The Idea of Prehistory, of 1962, was later revised with Colin Renfrew. He also published detective novels, one of them, The Cambridge Murders of 1945, under the name Dilwyn Rees. The laboratory for archaeogenetics at the McDonald Institute in Cambridge is named for him. The parts of this life that bear on the gorge are the 1937 identification of the cairn as a chambered long barrow, and the coining, by 1937, of the Cotswold–Severn group.

Richard John Copland Atkinson, CBE, led the excavation in 1960. He was born on 22 January 1920 at Evershot in Dorset and died on 10 October 1994. He went to Sherborne School and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics, and economics. In the Second World War his Quaker beliefs made him a conscientious objector. In 1944 he became assistant keeper of archaeology at the Ashmolean Museum. In 1949 he was appointed a lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Between 1950 and 1964 he directed excavations at Stonehenge for the Ministry of Works. In that period he helped to carry arguments about how Stonehenge was built to a wider audience, including a 1954 television programme, Buried Treasure, which used teams of schoolboys to show how the stones might have been moved by water or over land. He also investigated Silbury Hill, the West Kennet Long Barrow, and Wayland's Smithy, and he worked with Peggy Piggott and Stuart Piggott. The passage bone from this gorge is recorded as coming from his excavation of 1960 to 1961, and the record names him as a professor at Cardiff. He made only minimal records of the 1960 dig at the cairn. No report of that dig was published until Alasdair Whittle and Michael Wysocki, in 1998, set out the radiocarbon dates, the human bones, and the local and regional setting. Their account is described as the most complete dating programme undertaken for any chambered tomb in Wales. After the excavation of 1960 the cromlech was placed in the guardianship of the Ministry of Public Building and Works, and in 1961 it was partly restored. The schedule account says the whole structure was re-excavated and restored in 1960 to 1961.

Alasdair William Richardson Whittle was born on 7 May 1949. He studied Literae Humaniores, that is classics, at Christ Church, Oxford, and he remained there for a doctorate, completed in 1976, on the earlier Neolithic of southern England and its contacts with the Continent. He was Distinguished Research Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff from 1997 to 2018. In 1998 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and he is a founding Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales. With Vicki Cummings he edited Going Over: The Mesolithic-Neolithic Transition in North-West Europe. His other books include Europe in the Neolithic: the creation of new worlds, The Archaeology of People: Dimensions of Neolithic Life, and Sacred Mound, Holy Ring. He has also written on problems in Neolithic archaeology. The 1998 study of this cairn, its dates, its contents, and its context, is his work with Michael Wysocki. That study is the basis for the long span of use, the contrast between chamber and passage, the mobile life suggested for some of the men, and the meat-oriented diet.

The Gower Peninsula, in Welsh Penrhyn Gŵyr, or simply Gower, Gŵyr, is a peninsula in the south-west of Wales. It is the most westerly part of the historic county of Glamorgan, and it now lies within the City and County of Swansea. It projects toward the Bristol Channel. In 1956 the greater part of Gower became the first area in the United Kingdom to be designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Until 1974 Gower was administered as a rural district. It was then merged with the county borough of Swansea, and from 1974 to 1996 it formed the Swansea district. Since 1996 it has been part of the unitary authority. That designation of 1956 is a designation of the peninsula's landscape. It is not a separate claim that this cairn was inscribed on a world list. The cairn itself is scheduled as a chambered long cairn of the early Neolithic, in the class of religious, ritual, and funerary monuments. It is described as of national importance because of what it can add to knowledge of prehistoric burial and ritual, including the structure and the ancient environment. Chambered long cairns may belong to a larger cluster of monuments, and their importance can be increased by that group value. The scheduled area comprises the remains and the ground around them. A date for the scheduling is not given in the account used here, so none is stated.

The cairn is maintained as a monument in the care of the historic environment service of the Welsh Government. The site is open to the public with no charge for entry. It is open all year, from 1 April to 31 March, during reasonable daylight hours. Visitors are asked to come only during those hours, which were chosen so that the light would be adequate and the visit safer. Smoking is not permitted. Dogs are welcome. The ground is exposed to the weather and may be slippery or muddy, so footwear should suit the season and the kind of monument. Fixed guardrails are not to be climbed over or climbed through. Plants growing on the site may be poisonous to people and to animals, and dogs should not be allowed to eat the vegetation. A small car park is given both as space for 12 to 15 cars and as space for 20 vehicles. The distance from that parking to the chamber is given as about 250 yards, as about 750 feet, as about 230 metres, and as 250 metres. A kissing gate allows a wheelchair onto a level asphalt track that runs down the gorge and passes within about 10 feet, or 3 metres, of the cairn. The walk is also described as relatively smooth, and the terrain as level and accessible. Those are the published conditions of a visit. They are not a reconstruction of the path by which the dead were brought here in the early Neolithic.

What the place was, then, is a stone tomb for the dead of a small early farming age that, on the evidence of these bones, had not become a society of cereal fields. What led to it was the spread of chambered tombs of the Cotswold–Severn kind across the limestone of western Britain, set on ground that may already have been a clearing and a meeting place, at a time when the sea was still lower and the woodland still thick. What was at stake in the building was a place to which bodies, or bones, could be returned over many generations, somewhere between three centuries and eight. What it changed, on the evidence that survives, was the gorge itself: a hidden dry valley received a permanent stone interior, later roofless, later dug, and later given back some of its plan. What the digging found was broken and ordered human bone, a little Neolithic pottery, flint, quartz, a missing piece of stalactite, and animal bone of more than one age, some of which may always have been cave bone moved in antiquity, and some of which is now thought to have been put into the passage only in modern times.

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