Carreg Coetan Arthur & Gwal-y-Filiast | Two Neolithic Dolmens in West Wales
- apeach5
- Jan 24
- 18 min read
Two Preseli Neolithic Dolmens: Carreg Coetan Arthur and Gwal-y-Filiast: From the Nevern estuary to the Wolf’s Lair — bluestones, folklore, and solstice and lunar alignments in West Wales
Introduction
Welcome to Stone Temple Gardening — a place for slow encounters with ancient landscapes, where stone, light, sound, and land are allowed to work together.
Stone Temple Gardening is not a formal guidebook, and it is not an archaeological catalogue of monuments. It does not rush through dates or treat prehistoric sites as inert objects to be processed and explained. Instead, it asks a harder question: why were certain places chosen, returned to, and marked so carefully over generations, and what happens when we meet those places with attention today?
Here, ancient sites are approached as experiences rather than artefacts. They are walked toward along deliberate lines of approach; they are entered, circled, and lingered within. Attention is given to horizons and slopes, to watercourses and enclosure, and to long sightlines aligned with the movements of the sun and moon. These astronomical orientations are treated not as abstract calculations, but as events; moments when land and sky briefly lock together and sharpen awareness, stimulate thought and widen perception of place.
Listening matters as much as looking. Wind, water, echo, and the way sound gathers or disperses within stone and earth all shape how a place is felt. Some sites quiet the world; others focus it. These acoustic conditions work alongside light and form, subtly directing attention and deepening presence.
With time and careful attention, some places begin to reveal more than structure. Shapes clarify. Sightlines resolve. A face seems half-suggested by stone; an animal hinted at by shadow or outline. At several of the sites explored here, long, sinuous forms emerge — serpentine shapes implied by the lie of the land, the fall of stone, and the movement of approach. They are not carved or proclaimed. They are recognised.
These moments are not offered as hidden meanings or mystical truths, but as clues. They suggest that certain locations naturally concentrate perception, memory, and pattern-recognition more strongly than others. Crucially, such responses are not evenly distributed. They cluster around specific places — sites repeatedly selected, aligned, and marked over generations.
This points to a way of building that worked with the perceptual and psychological qualities of place rather than imposing form onto neutral ground. Monument-building, in this view, framed and intensified what was already present: shaping encounters with stone, sound, sky, and landscape so that particular moments — a solstice sunset, a lunar rise, a sudden recognition of form — could be returned to and remembered.
The purpose of this article is not to declare what these monuments meant, but to explore how meaning may have arisen through encounter. What follows is an invitation to slow down, to look, to listen, and to notice how land, monument, and sky sometimes combine to make a place feel unmistakably charged.
The Ritual Landscape of Preseli, West Wales (Part 4): Bluestone Monuments and Traces of Animism
This post continues a series exploring the West Wales landscape of Preseli, approached as a connected ritual terrain rather than a set of isolated monuments. Earlier visits took us first to Gors Fawr, a stone circle set high on the northern flank of the hills, and then to Pentre Ifan, the monumental Neolithic portal tomb whose capstone carries a distinctly serpentine character. Most recently, we parked in the small village of Moylegrove and walked the coastal path before climbing the ridge to Llech-y-Drybedd, a compact portal dolmen set above the cliffs, where sea, stone, and horizon converge.
In this post, two dolmens — one poised at the edge of the sea, the other set deep within the green heart of woodland — reveal the Preseli bluestone landscape as a place shaped by movement: of tides and routes, enclosure and sky. Though formed of the same stone and drawn from the same geological source region later linked to Stonehenge, their settings generate markedly different atmospheres. In this fourth part we remain within that shared landscape and turn our attention to these monuments at its margins: Carreg Coetan Arthur, a coastal dolmen close to the Irish Sea, and Gwal-y-Filiast, set inland within a sheltered grove. Together, they form a contrasting pair, distinct in experience yet clearly belonging to the same ritual and material world.
The Journey to Carreg Coetan Arthur
The path south from our last stop at Llech-y-Drybedd curls away like a thought unfinished, slipping between pasture and pockets of woodland where the light breaks and gathers again. Hedges lean in close, then release you back into open ground. Cattle stand heavy and still, chewing the cud while staring at nothing particular. Now and then the land falls away and the sea returns in flashes, a sudden sheet of silver through branches, a brief widening of the horizon, before the trees close again and the road resumes its quiet unravelling.
The miles pass almost without notice, as though the landscape is gently escorting you onward rather than being crossed. By the time Newport Bay begins to assert itself, the air has changed. It carries salt and openness, and the sense of enclosure that clung to the inland fields loosens its grip. It is here, on the threshold between farmland and estuary, that another dolmen comes into view — lower, simpler, closer to the human scale than its bigger brothers. It does not announce itself. Instead, it waits, settled into its surroundings like a piece of old furniture left where it has always belonged.
Carreg Coetan Arthur sits on a gentle rise within sight of the sea, set in a manicured green sward and enclosed by trees and a tight hedgerow that now mutes what was once a more open, commanding position. Below, entirely veiled by foliage, the sea narrows into the green estuary of the River Nevern (Afon Nyfer), where freshwater meets tide and the soundscape shifts: from the exposed wind of the ridge to the hard, scolding calls of circling gulls. It stands just beyond a small housing development, and the cries of children playing in nearby gardens drift across on the breeze, bright as birdsong caught in passing. The monument’s present setting feels uneasy. It is pressed close by foliage, its posture almost hunched, as if attempting either to withdraw from the modern world or to push back against it, reclaiming some trace of its former presence.
Step closer, though, and its form begins to assert itself.
At first glance the tomb appears almost defiant: a low, slanting capstone resting on two of its four uprights, its mass pressed downward rather than lifted, as though one of the great upland dolmens had been compressed and set beside the sea. The tight hedgerow closes in so intently that the monument reads less as a ruin than as something confined — an animal penned in too small a space, its posture altered by pressure rather than age, as if straining to see the waves and tides below for one last time. Archaeologists suggest the monument was established, like the other dolmens discussed here, in the early Neolithic, around 3,800 BC. They also suggest it was once enclosed within a mound. If so, time and erosion have stripped it back to a concentrated architectural core of roof, supports, and the space deliberately held between them. What remains is weight distilled rather than diminished: a forceful clarity of intention, and into that held volume the imagination moves easily, compelled to occupy the space the monument still insists upon.
The name Carreg Coetan Arthur is usually translated as “Arthur’s Little Quoit”. The association is late, but it is revealing. Across Wales and Cornwall, Arthurian names cling to dolmens, standing stones, and ancient places, marking points where older sanctity seems to have persisted beneath later layers of myth. These are not origins so much as overlays — legends settling where significance already lay. These places invite reinvention.
Here at Newport, the title compresses vastness into intimacy. Local lore imagines the capstone as a quoit from some primordial game, a story that sits comfortably with the monument’s poised, almost competitive stance above the estuary. In such tales, play and creation blur together. The monument becomes both relic and gesture — a fossil of divine pastime rather than a feat of labour alone.
Arthur and the Bear
One Welsh interpretation glosses Arthur as “Great Bear”. Whether or not that etymology holds linguistically, the image is suggestive. Bears were venerated across parts of northern Europe well into prehistory, associated with strength, liminality, and seasonal cycles of withdrawal and return. As with dragon lore, it is not necessary to argue for a direct survival of bear cults in Wales to recognise how readily such imagery could have attached itself to places already perceived as powerful.
Place-names have a way of sheltering memory long after the cultures that formed them have vanished. Arthurian names seem to gather around prehistoric monuments with striking consistency, not as explanations but as later mythic veneers — stories settling where significance already lay. In this sense, Arthur functions less as a historical figure than as a cultural magnet, drawing legend toward stones whose meaning was already felt, if no longer fully understood.
At Carreg Coetan Arthur, that compression of myth and monument feels especially apt. The dolmen’s modest scale, its poised stance above the estuary, and its proximity to routes of movement and departure all lend themselves to tales where play, power, and creation blur together.
But Carreg Coetan Arthur also occupies a strikingly strategic position within the wider geography of Preseli. The dolmen sits close to the lip of the Nevern estuary, at a natural threshold where hill meets sea, fresh water meets salt, and where settlement gives way to departure.
In his book Stonehenge Deciphered, Alun Rees suggests that this stretch of water may once have functioned as a Neolithic port, from which the nearby Stonehenge-destined bluestones were quarried and transported before being loaded onto rafts and set out on their long journey towards Salisbury Plain. The method of transportation has long been debated: some argue for a land route, others, like Rees, for the sea. The idea remains speculative, but it is not implausible. At this meeting of freshwater and tide, where the estuary gathers itself before opening to the sea, it is easy to sense how such a place might have been used for departure and transition.
Rees notes a rocky outcrop below the tomb that could have served as a Neolithic hard — a simple loading platform at the water’s edge. Only excavation could confirm this, and there are currently no plans to investigate the site. Drawing on the experience of his freind, a master mariner and Bristol Channel pilot, Rees argues that the bluestones could have been transported efficiently by raft and tide in a matter of days rather than months, entering the Severn system and travelling up the River Avon before making their way inland.
Whether or not this scenario proves correct, the broader point holds. Carreg Coetan Arthur is not an isolated monument but one positioned at a node of movement — between land and water, local landscape and distant horizon — where journeys, both practical and symbolic, may once have begun.
Standing beside the dolmen as the tide turned, I could imagine ancient vessels drawn up along the banks: logs lashed, ropes stretched taut, the shimmer of spotted dolerite waiting at sunrise for the pull of the current. The same waters that lap below the dolmen today may once have carried its kin away.
Archaeologically, Carreg Coetan Arthur belongs to the same lineage as Pentre Ifan — a portal dolmen oriented towards the estuary. Yet its mood is different. Where Pentre Ifan soars, Arthur stoops; where that capstone lifts toward the sky, this one listens to the water. It feels less like a temple than a threshold — a point of exchange between the fixed and the fluid.
Looking intently as the sun broke through, the stone took on a pewter sheen. From the downslope side, the capstone’s taper pulled the eye towards the now obscured estuary, as if the monument were quietly pointing to the water. Crouched beneath it, its underbelly cool and dimpled, I thought of the weight it once bore — not only the alleged vanished mound, but the possible burden of all those stories of departure. In that moment, the Preseli narrative closed a great arc: from mountain quarry to tidal margin, from the slow pulse of the hills to the restless cadence of the sea. If the bluestones truly set out from here, their leaving was not an ending but a continuation — the stones of Preseli flowing outward, carrying the voice of the uplands towards their destiny as the first stones to be set within the sweeping vistas of Salisbury Plain.
Phenomenology: Light, Shadow, Stone, and Form
Returning to my quiet, intent observations, I noticed while circling the monument that a recurring shape became apparent — a subtle wedge-like inclination that echoes forms already observed at Pentre Ifan and Llech-y-Drybedd. It is not a precise repetition, but a family resemblance: a shared logic of lift and balance, where mass appears to hover rather than settle.
At Carreg Coetan Arthur, light slides beneath the capstone’s edge, sharpening the line where stone meets air, while shadow pools in the narrow space below. What should read as static instead suggests motion held in check, as though the stone were poised rather than placed. There is a consistency here — not of measurement, but of gesture. These capstones do not merely cover space; they articulate it. Their slanted planes draw the body towards them, encouraging approach and circulation rather than a single fixed viewpoint. Whatever roles these structures once played, their makers appear to have understood how form itself could shape perception. Again and again, the cut and angle of the stone resolve into something suggestive — an echo, perhaps, of a serpent’s head or animal face. Many of these tombs adopt a wedge-like form that readily invites animistic reading. At Carreg Coetan Arthur, three sides display this tendency with striking clarity. This is pareidolia in action: the human capacity to perceive pattern and presence in ambiguous forms. Crucially, it is a capacity we share with the builders. Here it need not be treated as delusion, but as a possible selection strategy — forms seen, chosen, shaped, and set in place precisely because they remain open to interpretation, even across deep time. Meaning is not imposed from the past, but generated through repeated encounter, activated anew in each observer by the stimulated pareidolic imagination. The recurrence of such forms across sites is difficult to dismiss as coincidence alone.
Archaeoastronomy: Bluestone Magic and Robin Heath
Throughout my explorations of the Preseli landscape, I have drawn upon Robin Heath’s long-standing guide to the prehistoric sites of West Wales, Bluestone Magic (2011). Heath’s observations on placement, orientation, and alignment emerge from decades of close attention — a sustained engagement with monument, landscape, and sky that reflects careful perception as much as measurement. Within mainstream archaeology he is often regarded as a fringe theorist, yet his ideas are rooted in long familiarity with Preseli and in a willingness to think independently about its monuments. Archaeology is right to exercise caution: unchecked speculation can obscure understanding rather than sharpen it. But caution is not the same as refusal. While I remain sceptical of some of Heath’s more expansive claims, many of his observations merit examination rather than dismissal, and reward being held in view as part of a wider, questioning engagement with the landscape.
According to Heath’s theodolite readings and astronomy software, Carreg Coetan Arthur may align with the midsummer sunset around 2800 BCE, with the sinking sun passing through a V-shaped notch formed by the rear uprights — a configuration also noted at Llech-y-Drybedd. Heath further suggests that during the major lunar standstill, which recurs every 18.6 years, the full moon, when viewed from Coetan Arthur, rises along the shoulder of distant Carn Ingli, briefly disappears behind its summit, and then re-emerges. It is a striking sequence, recalling the well-documented lunar movement at Callanish. What matters here is not the certainty of intention, but the clarity of the astronomical spectacle itself: the visible binding of sky-motion to landform.
“The dolmen’s location was chosen to match the lunar disc’s minimum height to the skyline, when the moon would appear like a glowing silver wheel as it rose up the left-hand edge of Carn Ingli.”
Heath, Bluestone Magic
Whether such celestial performances were embedded within ritual practices of revelation, divination, or priestly authority is something we cannot now recover. Yet the marking of place through a sightline to an extreme lunar event would have been sufficient to invest a location like Carreg Coetan Arthur with enduring cosmological significance. In that light, the tomb may be read not as the origin of meaning, but as its later commemoration — a stone expression set within an already charged landscape.
Leaving the tidal margins of Newport behind, our Preseli story now turns inland once more. Coastal brightness gives way to wooded lanes and rising ground as the route climbs towards another chambered monument — one whose name abandons Arthurian play for something older and more unsettling.
Gwal-y-Filiast — The Wolf’s Lair Above the Tâf
From Newport the road bends north again, climbing toward moorland where pasture loosens into bracken and the sky lowers to meet the ridge. The air cools. Wind carries peat and distant rain. We leave the car on a quiet stretch between abandoned farm buildings and open grazing; both slowly being reclaimed by ivy and collapse. From there, a gated farm track runs on for half a mile beneath overhung fir and pine, the trees closing into a green corridor that narrows attention and pace alike. Needles soften the ground. Banks rise close on either side. For long stretches there is little to look at but bark, shadow, and the slow forward pull of the path.
Then, without warning, the land begins to fall away. Through gaps in the trees, you become aware of the ridge dropping steeply towards the river below. Hoary, moss-clad stones appear one at a time at the edge of the track — not dramatic, not even clearly arranged, but suggestive enough to slow you down. A few steps further, the conifers loosen. Hazel and beech take over, pale trunks opening into a small hollow that holds the monument like a pocket in the hillside.
The name Gwal-y-Filiast is usually rendered as the Lair of the Greyhound Bitch, though it is sometimes given more mythic force as the She-Wolf’s Rest, depending on how the old Welsh is read. Either way, the approach prepares you for it. Just before the chamber, scattered stones rise from the verge — perhaps the last hints of a vanished mound or kerb — low, unassertive markers that feel less like remains than like preliminaries.
The dolmen sits within this enclosure, heavy and almost earthbound. Its capstone peers through branch and shade towards the Afon Tâf, not lifted but settled, as though the hillside itself had paused here to rest. Unlike the airy lift of Pentre Ifan or the estuarine tilt of Carreg Coetan Arthur, Gwal-y-Filiast turns inward. The capstone — broad, slumbering, borne on uprights — rests low, defining a chamber that screens both sky and horizon. You must stoop to enter. When you do, the world changes texture. Sound dulls to the muffled rush of water somewhere below. Light does not enter so much as thin at the margins, filtered and muted by canopy and stone. Breath draws in the cool, damp scent of bark, leaf mould, and mineral shadow. The effect is containment rather than address. The monument does not declare itself; it gathers.
Although it has never been excavated and has no associated finds, archaeology identifies it as an early Neolithic monument, broadly contemporary with Pentre Ifan and the others, around 3,800 BC, and built from the same spotted dolerite that runs through the Preseli hills. Yet typology alone cannot account for the character of this place. Here, the monumental impulse is not displayed to the horizon. It is folded into the slope and the trees.
Circling the chamber, the familiar wedge-like inclination appears again, but subdued. Here it draws not outward to estuary or sky, but downward, towards the unseen river and the pull of the ground itself. In the dim interstices — where filtered light pools and shadows deepen — forms begin to suggest themselves. A curve reads briefly as a muzzle; the swell of the capstone hints at a flank. These are not figures, only family resemblances: momentary invitations in stone, where form holds long enough to imply life before letting it go.
The name gestures towards guardians of a more unsettling kind. In Welsh tradition the filiast is no ordinary hound but a creature of pursuit and boundary — part greyhound, part wolf — bound to transformation and omen. It echoes Ceridwen’s milast, the greyhound bitch who chased Gwion through successive forms in his flight towards awen, and it rhymes with the spectral hounds whose cries were said to drive the restless westward. Here, these stories do not explain the monument so much as adhere to it. The dolmen reads as a lair — not a dwelling, but a point of passage — where entry and exit blur, and descent and return collapse into a single motion.
Below, the Afon Tâf winds through a steepening valley, gathering force into rapids. In its shallows lies Crochan Arthur, Arthur’s Cauldron: a natural hollow long read as vessel rather than void. Nearby traditions speak of St Teilo tending abandoned infants beside the river, feeding them from its waters until they grew to manhood and were remembered as the Seven Saints. Taken together these fragments sketch a valley understood as passage, care, and potency: water that moves outward and downhill, carrying force and renewal, while the dolmen above holds the inward turn.
In a landscape where Preseli’s bluestones were once credited with curative virtues, it is not difficult to imagine that rivers flowing from their uplands were thought to carry something of that quality with them — drawing it downhill, outward, and away. Folklore remembers Gwal-y-Filiast in other ways too: as the bed of a giantess who gave birth to wolves, or as a kennel for otherworldly hounds guarding hidden wealth. The stories differ, but their themes converge — boundaries crossed, forms unsettled, the human world giving way to something older and less certain.
Sitting near the entrance, the woodland pressed close. Sound softened beneath the capstone; the air held the damp, mineral scent of stone and leaf mould. Bees threaded the clearing. A crow passed unseen above the canopy. Wind moved through leaves rather than open space. The monument did not perform. It received. Nothing here announced itself.
The wolf, in this sense, is not a devourer but a keeper of thresholds. To meet such a figure is to recognise that entry and exit are bound together, that descent and return form a single movement. Gwal-y-Filiast embodies this in architectural form: a chamber neither open nor sealed, held in suspension between world and underworld.
As the day darkened, the dolmen withdrew further into the trees, becoming less an object than a condition of the hillside itself. Perhaps this is one of Preseli’s defining qualities. Its monuments do not rise against the landscape; they emerge from it, shaped by the same forces that form ridge, forest, and stone. The two dolmens encountered here mark not an ending but a pause — thresholds crossed, orientations recalibrated — before the terrain draws the journey higher once again.
Conclusion: Thresholds Held in Stone
Taken together, Carreg Coetan Arthur and Gwal-y-Filiast reveal something essential about the Preseli landscape and the monuments raised within it. These dolmens are not isolated structures placed at random, nor are they mute remnants awaiting symbolic decoding. They are thresholds — carefully recognised points where land, water, sky, and movement converge, and where attention is gathered, shaped, and held.
At the Nevern estuary, Carreg Coetan Arthur opens outward. It listens to tide and horizon, marking a place of departure where stone, water, and sky meet in motion. Whether or not bluestones once set out from this shore, the monument’s posture makes sense within a landscape oriented toward movement, transition, and the pull of distant horizons. Inland, at Gwal-y-Filiast, the gesture is reversed. Here the monument turns inward, withdrawing into woodland and slope, holding sound, light, and body in containment. One faces outward flow, the other holds descent and return. Together, they form a paired grammar of orientation — not opposites, but complements.
Across both sites, a consistent logic emerges. The builders of Preseli did not impose meaning onto neutral ground. They recognised places already capable of concentrating experience — places where form, light, enclosure, and horizon worked upon the body and imagination — and they marked those places in stone. Monument-building, in this sense, intensified perception rather than invented belief. Animistic readings, mythic overlays, and later folklore did not create that significance; they settled where it was already felt, clinging to sites whose power endured long after its original language had faded.
If there is a thread running through this journey, it is that meaning arises through encounter. It is generated in the meeting of stone and body, light and shadow, movement and pause. These monuments do not instruct. They do not declare. They gather, frame, and hold — inviting attention rather than demanding interpretation.
If you’ve found something here that resonates — an image, a place, a way of looking — I invite you to share this piece and add your own observations in the comments. How do these monuments read to you? What do you notice when you linger, return, and look again? Conversation, like landscape, is shaped by the paths we choose to follow — and by what we pause to attend to along the way.
Select Bibliography.
Heath, R. (2011) Bluestone Magic: The Stone Circles and Landscapes of West Wales. Pontypool: Bluestone Press.
Rees, A.G. (2025) Stonehenge Deciphered: The Geometry, Astronomy and Purpose of Britain’s Greatest Prehistoric Monument. Haverfordwest: Three Pools Publishing.
Alexander Peach, 21/01/2026
