Discovering Gors Fawr Stone Circle and My Find of a New Ancient Polissoir Stone
- apeach5
- Oct 26
- 15 min read
Welcome to Stone Temple Gardening, where we dig deep into the rich earth of the past.
Last August, I returned to the sacred hills of Preseli—a landscape steeped in myth, memory, and the murmur of ancient stone. It had been more than twenty years since I last stood at Gors Fawr, the final surviving stone circle in the area. This time, I came back with purpose. In 2005, I stumbled upon a very unusual stone there—one that has stayed with me ever since. I wanted to see it again, to test what time and distance might have changed, and perhaps uncover what it meant.
Read on to find out what I discovered.
Gors Fawr Stone Circle and the Land of the Stonehenge Bluestones
To walk across the Preseli uplands is to traverse a sacred landscape alive with myth, memory, and meaning. Low, blue-grey ridges rise gently from the plain, their slopes scattered with the remains of countless prehistoric ventures: dolmens, standing stones, cairns, barrows, and enclosures. This is the birthplace of Stonehenge’s star-splattered bluestones, quarried from local dolerite outcrops such as Carn Goedog, then carried by sledge and raft hundreds of kilometres to Wiltshire.
Yet Preseli was far more than a quarry. It was a ceremonial heartland, rich with evidence that its Neolithic inhabitants were deeply attuned to stone, sky, earth, and water. Monuments here mark solar and lunar events, processional paths, and territorial awareness, weaving human intention into the natural contours of the land. In these quiet expanses of moor and marsh, we glimpse a world where stone became memory made tangible, and landscape scripture — a living text etched by hands long turned to dust, yet still resonant with the echoes of ancient voices.
Gors Fawr Stone Circle: The Circle Itself
Amid this ritualised terrain lies the lone surviving stone circle of Gors Fawr — modest yet profound. Gors Fawr, I suggest, embodies a convergence of vision, craft, and cosmology — a modest monument that reveals how Neolithic builders engaged with the land as participant, not just backdrop.
The circle comprises sixteen small, blue-grey dolerite stones, many low and half-sunk into peat, their weathered surfaces bearing the soft patina of millennia — a surface that, like Stonehenge’s bluestones, may once have been polished to reveal their sparkling, starlike patterning.
The stones form a near-perfect ring approximately 72 feet (22 metres) in diameter, varying in stature from 1 foot (0.3 metres) to 3 feet 7 inches (1.1 metres) above ground. Compact yet evocative, Gors Fawr invites contemplation of the rituals and alignments that once animated this numinous space beneath the ancient Welsh skies.
Today the site is boggy and spiky with rough gorse and marsh grass — Gors Fawr literally translates from the Welsh as “Great Marsh.” Rain pools collect around the stones, shimmering like mirrors that reflect the open sky and drifting clouds, turning the ground into a mosaic of fleeting celestial portraits. Morning mists drape the circle in mystery, veiling it in soft luminescence; at dusk, the stones appear to hover between earth and air, suspended in a perpetual threshold of twilight. The circle does not command attention by scale but by setting: it draws the gaze outward, into the wider landscape.
At a distance of 440 feet (134 metres) to the northeast stand a pair of taller outliers, once linked to the circle by a stone avenue — some of the buried stones still visible. One rises to 6 feet 3 inches (1.9 metres), the other to 5 feet 7 inches (1.7 metres), set about 46 feet (14 metres) apart. Their alignment runs southwest to northeast, pointing towards the midsummer sunrise over Foel Dyrch. A few buried monoliths flank the approach to the circle, confirming antiquarian accounts of a former avenue oriented toward the devotional hills and the summer solstice sunrise.
When I first visited in 2005, the tops of these outliers seemed to mirror the profiles of the hills behind them. Since then, trees have grown to obscure the sightlines. One stone forms a natural seat, known locally as the “Dreaming Stone.” Their alignment with the Preseli ridges — the very hills that supplied Stonehenge’s bluestones — suggests a ceremonial avenue guiding movement through bog and stream. These markers may have framed rites performed in full view of the sacred hills, linking local rituals to distant reverence — a microcosm of the broader ambition that propelled stones across prehistoric Britain.
The circle’s small, intimate form suggests a late Neolithic or early Bronze Age date, part of a continuum of monumental experimentation spanning centuries. Unlike massive megalithic enclosures, Gors Fawr invites quiet participation. Its low profile fosters intimacy, drawing the observer into the scene rather than overwhelming them. Its builders were concerned with horizon and landscape, not monumental dominance. Here, ceremony seems to have been shared with land, sky, and ancestors — an open-air communion where boundaries between participant and place dissolved.
From this modest ring, the gaze naturally expands. Here, the horizon becomes a participant.
The Horizon’s Embrace: Views and Alignments from Gors Fawr
To stand within Gors Fawr is to stand at the heart of a living horizon. The circle sits in low ground at the foot of the Preseli ridge, yet it is nowhere enclosed; the land stretches outward, each rise and tor breathing with memory. To the north, Carn Menyn and Carn Goedog rise like the spines of ancient giants, their dolerite tors once called upon to populate distant Stonehenge. Eastward, Foel Feddau and the great Foel Cwmcerwyn, often shrouded in cloud yet unmistakable in form, crown the skyline with cairns and ramparts. Westward, the twin peaks of Carn Bica and Carn Ingli mark the dying sun’s passage, steadfast and solemn. When the light falls just so, Carn Ingli seems to hover above Newport Bay — a hill wrapped in tales of angels, visions, and revelation.
Eastward, the ridge unfolds toward Foel Drygarn — a triple-topped fortress of cairns. To the south, the land softens, falling toward the Eastern Cleddau and the distant Narberth Hills, where wooded slopes and open fields offer a gentle counterpoint — a quiet edge to this ritual theatre of stone and sky.
The arc of hills surrounding Gors Fawr forms a natural amphitheatre, each summit bearing the weight of ancient activity. Though modest beside these greater heights, the circle’s position is deliberate. It occupies a level space between water and hill, earth and sky, commanding a view of every major summit of Preseli. The builders knew this horizon; they placed the circle within its embrace, positioning it as a fulcrum in a larger cosmic design.
Sky and Stone: The Celestial Dialogue
What the land suggests in form, the heavens echo in motion. Several observers have remarked on alignments that reinforce this impression. The midwinter sunrise is said to appear over Carn Goedog, the highest of the Preseli hills, while the midsummer sunset is said to fall toward the notch of Carn Ingli. If correct, these reciprocal orientations suggest that the circle was placed with celestial rhythm in mind — a theatre for watching the heavens move across the land, as if the sun itself were making pilgrimage from one sacred height to another. The northernmost moonrise occurs close to Foel Cwmcerwyn, the southernmost beyond the low hills of the Cleddau, tracing the extremes of the lunar standstill cycle. These horizons may not form the tight geometries of later megalithic astronomy, but they enact the same principle: sky and hill as calendar, movement made sacred through place (Ruggles, 1999, pp. 112–118).
And always, the eye is drawn back to Foel Dyrch— the ridge of bluestone tors glinting above the moor. Geological study confirms this as one of the principal sources of Stonehenge’s bluestones, first identified by H. H. Thomas (1923) and later confirmed by Richard Bevins and Rob Ixer (2013). Whether by chance or design, Gors Fawr lies on the natural route between these quarries and the sea, where the stones might have begun their long journey east. Some have speculated that the circle itself marked a gathering or staging point for that movement — a ceremonial prelude to transport, or perhaps an echo of the same cosmological vision that later found its ultimate form on Salisbury Plain (Darvill & Wainwright, 2011).
Whatever its purpose, Gors Fawr remains a place where the Preseli skyline and the sky’s own architecture are one and the same: a ring of stones reflecting the greater circle above. The view from Gors Fawr is more than scenery; it is a text. Each hill, each rise and hollow, appears to have been understood as part of a greater grammar of place. Across the Preseli landscape, circles, cairns, and outcrops seem to answer one another — stone mirroring stone, horizon echoing horizon. The builders read the land as others might read the sky: not as background but as revelation.
From this quiet hollow, the Preseli range becomes a kind of cosmological map. The tors of Carn Meini, the fortress of Foel Drygarn, the far ridge of Carn Ingli — all mark turning points not only in the sun’s course but in a pattern of meaning that joined earth, ancestry, and the heavens. Gors Fawr sits within that design, a modest circle at the meeting of water and upland, perhaps once a gathering place before the long journey of the bluestones began. What remains today still speaks of their vision: a world in which orientation was understanding, and to build in stone was to align with creation itself.
The Ceremonial Landscape of Preseli
When seen from above, the Preseli range appears less a random scatter of monuments than a carefully composed terrain — a dialogue between natural prominence and human intent. From Foel Drygarn at the eastern edge to Carn Ingli in the west, the ridge forms a spine of stone, its tors erupting like black bones through the turf. Along its flanks lie cairns, circles, and standing stones, each placed where horizon and light appear to converse, creating a network of visual and ritual interconnections.
Gors Fawr occupies the southern foothills of this system: a circle set in a wide, boggy plain watered by streams that drain from the ridge above. Nearby are traces of outlying stones — some now recumbent, others lost to time — that may once have extended the monument’s reach or formed part of a larger design. To the north, a scatter of cairns leads the eye back toward Carn Meini and Bedd Arthur, the latter a Neolithic burial chamber whose name translates as “Arthur’s Grave.” Though its stones predate the legends attached to them, folklore imbues it with a heroic past, linking the land to the mythic King Arthur and his kin. Bedd Arthur stands as a small oval of upright stones on a ridge, its shape reminiscent of a ship poised for voyage.
Archaeologists such as Steve Burrow have argued that these sites are linked not by direct pathways but by visibility and orientation — by a choreography of sightlines across the hills (Burrow, 2006). Movement through this landscape would have carried the traveller from one ensouled prominence to another, tracing the line of the bluestones themselves: from quarry to circle, from tor to sea. It is not hard to imagine a ceremonial route descending from Carn Meini, crossing the streams near Gors Fawr, and continuing southward toward the coast at Milford Haven or the Daugleddau estuary — natural embarkation points for any journey east. Whether such a passage ever took place we cannot say, yet the alignment of myth, geology, and monument lends the idea persuasive weight.
Alun Rees, in a forthcoming book Stonehenge Deciphered, argues for a Bluestones sea route to Stonehenge from this very region, suggesting a possible Neolithic “hard” or jetty below the dolmen of Carreg Coetan Arthur at Newport, where bluestones could have been carried by raft and tide to the Bristol Channel and then on to Salisbury Plain. He also highlights scientific evidence from burials at Stonehenge that link key individuals to this area of Wales (watch this space for a full review of Stonehenge Deciphered soon).
Independent researcher Robin Heath, in his 2016 monograph Temple in the Hills, unveils a geometric blueprint he believes was etched across the Preseli landscape — an archetype for Stonehenge itself. If Burrow’s choreography of sightlines evokes lived experience, Heath’s geometric model proposes a cosmology mapped at scale. Drawing on megalithic metrology, archaeoastronomy, and precise theodolite surveys, Heath describes the “Preseli Wheel,” a vast, 550-foot (168-metre) henge-like design near Eglwyswrw. Its five radiating spokes, each spanning 3.52 miles (5.67 kilometres), converge on numinous nodes including Carn Menyn, Foel Drygarn, and Carningli, forming Pythagorean 3-4-5 triangles that encode cosmic ratios such as the lunar year and eclipse cycles. The wheel’s inner circle, encompassing the dolmens of Pentre Ifan, mirrors the proportional relationship between Stonehenge’s Aubrey and Sarsen Circles — suggesting the Wiltshire monument as a deliberate replication transported eastward, not merely in stone but in sacred geometry. Though speculative, his surveys open up a conversation about how geometric and astronomical thinking may have shaped regional monument placement.
Whether Heath’s vision is accurate remains open to debate, but what we know is that the bluestones of Stonehenge came from Preseli, and their geological and cultural memory is still anchored here among the hills that shaped them. To walk these slopes today is to sense that continuity — between mountain and plain, between what was raised by hand and what was given by the land itself. The Preseli monuments are not isolated acts of construction, but the visible residues of a shared cosmology across Britain: one that saw stone as the meeting point of time, earth, and the sky’s eternal motion.
Myth, Memory, and the Hills
The Preseli uplands are alive not only with stones and cairns but with story. Tales of enchanted beasts, fairy folk, and otherworldly presences cling to the tors and ridges like morning mist. These tales matter because the medieval manuscripts that preserve them may echo much older mythic geographies. For instance, across these hills runs the path of Twrch Trwyth, the magical wild boar of Culhwch and Olwen in the Mabinogion. In the tale, Arthur and his companions pursue the beast across valleys and ridges until it is driven into the sea. One imagines the chase echoing along the Preseli skyline, the hills themselves marking stages of this cosmic drama — their rocky outcrops serving as both backdrop and participant in the mythic hunt. It hints at mythic geographic importance.
The air of these hills also carries whispers of the Tylwyth Teg, the fairy folk of Welsh tradition, said to inhabit cairns, burial mounds, and solitary standing stones. Mist gathers in folds along the ridges, and sudden lights or sounds hint at a world just beyond perception, where the devotional and the everyday intertwine. These narratives, woven into the very contours of the landscape, transform the physical remnants of prehistory into vessels of imagination, bridging the space between archaeological fact and folkloric wonder.
Gors Fawr sits within this realm of story as much as stone. Its dolerite slabs and open horizon make it a place where the past’s presence is quietly unmistakable. Just as Bedd Arthur echoes Arthurian legend and the hills recall the chase of Twrch Trwyth, Gors Fawr invites us to see the Neolithic landscape as a palimpsest — a space where ritual, myth, and the enduring world of stone converse, layer upon layer. Here, the boundary between history and story, between lived experience and imagination, is porous: a threshold both literal and symbolic, inviting modern visitors to step into a dialogue that spans epochs.
Ceremony and Landscape
Standing within Gors Fawr today, one notices not enclosure but openness. The stones frame the horizon, the distant hills, and the sky itself. Light and weather play across the dolerite, animating it with shifting patterns of shadow and gleam. Larks rise above in celestial song; sheep wander between the stones, their hooves softly imprinting the peat. Gorse and bog grass carpet the summer land in prickly green, while in winter, frost etches delicate filigree on the rock faces.
In this landscape, the monument’s power is subtle but palpable. It teaches that Neolithic ritual was immersive, participatory, and inseparable from the land — a practice engaging all the senses, from the chill of mist on skin to the vastness of the vaulted sky.
Perhaps this is why the circle survives more vividly in memory than in grandeur. Unlike its southern cousin at Stonehenge, it asks us to notice relationship rather than scale, movement rather than immobility, presence rather than monumentality. Ritual here would have been about aligning the self with horizon, stone, and sky — a microcosm of the wider ceremonial world, where every participant became part of the unfolding narrative of place.
Yet beneath this sensory theatre of wind and weather lie quieter traces of human craft — artefacts half-forgotten in the peat that whisper of the hands which shaped this place. It is in such hidden folds of the landscape that the circle’s deeper rituals reveal themselves, not through grand spectacle but through the intimate tools of creation and offering. The sacred dialogue of Preseli was not only one of sight and story but of touch. The same landscape that framed solstice and legend also yielded the raw material of devotion: dolerite shaped, polished, and consecrated by human hands. To follow these traces of craft is to walk another kind of procession through the land — one guided by the hands of the people rather than the numinous horizon.
Polissoirs, Axe Rituals, and the Ceremonial Landscape of Gors Fawr Stone Circle
Hidden beneath the encroaching gorse of Gors Fawr lies a stone that few eyes have seen, yet it speaks across the centuries: a polissoir — a grinding stone once used to polish axes. The stone bears the characteristic concavity, linear striations, and sheen of use consistent with known examples from Wiltshire and Armorica. I first discovered it twenty years ago, its shape unmistakable, and captured it in a photograph. Today it lies buried and invisible — a silent witness beneath the gorse — but in that moment of discovery, the stone seemed to hum with memory.
Professor Terence Meaden, having seen the image, noted how closely it resembles polissoirs known from Neolithic Britain. I tried again this summer to reach it beneath its dense, prickly armour but failed. The stone remains hidden for now — awaiting, perhaps, the careful hand of archaeology to reveal it once more.
Polissoirs were far more than functional implements. Here, raw dolerite from the nearby Preseli tors was transformed into gleaming axes — objects of power, exchange, and ritual deposition. Polished axes were tokens of status, instruments of ceremony, and conduits through which human skill and landscape intertwined. The Preseli hills themselves were cradles of production: Carn Menyn, Carn Goedog, and their neighbouring ridges served as “axe factories,” shaping stone that would travel across Britain to circles, tombs, and distant centres such as Stonehenge. Each polished edge carried the authority of place, the imprint of labour, and the resonance of the sacred.
That a polissoir lies at Gors Fawr transforms our understanding of the circle. It was not merely a gathering place or a theatre for observing the heavens; it was also a site of transformation — where raw stone became ritual object, where craft became ceremonial act. Across Britain, axes were used, traded, and deposited in rivers, lakes, and mounds — liminal spaces where water, horizon, and stone converged. At Gors Fawr, the polissoir links the circle to this wider network of production, trade, and ritual observance, embedding the labour and skill of the Preseli quarries into the very ground of the monument.
To hold a polissoir in mind is to feel the pulse of Gors Fawr itself. The axes it helped shape carried the weight of the landscape, the cosmos, and human devotion. Deposited within the circle, they made the place alive with significance — a nexus where sky and hill, craft and ceremony, memory and monument all converge. Even now, buried beneath the gorse, the polissoir contains echoes of a past in which every stone, every ridge, and every polished edge was part of a numinous choreography — a landscape crafted, watched, and revered.
Through such acts of making, polishing, and aligning, the Preseli people did not merely build within the landscape — they built with it.
Gors Fawr and the Memory of Preseli
Gors Fawr, like Preseli itself, reminds us that prehistoric Wales was not peripheral but central to ritual and cosmology. Here, stone was sacred before it became monumental; landscape before it became measured; movement before it became procession. The circle is small, the stones low, yet the place is vast — a liminal zone where the past still presses gently against the present, its quiet authority rooted in the interplay of earth and ether.
In the reflection of a pool, in the half-light of dawn, Gors Fawr stands quietly, echoing the hills from which its stones came. It is a monument to seeing and being seen, to local devotion and distant ambition, and to a landscape that has been sacred for more than five thousand years. Gors Fawr listens to the horizon. To walk here is to feel that the hills, the stones, and the sky are all participants in a dialogue older than writing, older than memory, yet immediately alive to anyone willing to pause and notice. In this enduring embrace, Gors Fawr endures not as a relic, but as a living invitation to remember.
Dr Alexander Peach, October 2025
Select Bibliography
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Burrow, S. (2006) The Tomb-Builders in Wales 4000–3000 BC. Cardiff: National Museum Wales Books.
Darvill, T. and Wainwright, G. (2009) ‘Stonehenge excavations: the Stonehenge Riverside Project seasons 1–2 (2008)’, Antiquaries Journal, 89, pp. 1–19.
Darvill, T. and Wainwright, G. (2011) Stonehenge Excavations 2008. London: Society of Antiquaries of London.
Heath, R. (2016) Temple in the Hills: The Discovery of the Original Stonehenge Geometry in the Preseli Hills of West Wales. Eglwyswrw: Bluestone Press.
Meaden, G.T. (1992) The Stonehenge Solution: Sacred Marriage and the Goddess. Shaftesbury: Element Books.
Parker Pearson, M. (2012) Stonehenge: Exploring the Greatest Stone Age Mystery. London: Simon & Schuster.
Pembrokeshire Coast National Park Authority (2025) ‘Ancient stone circle targeted by vandals’, Pembrokeshire Coast National Park News, 20 June. Available at: https://www.pembrokeshirecoast.wales/news/ancient-stone-circle-targeted-by-vandals/#. (Accessed: 24 October 2025).
Rees, A.G. (forthcoming, 2025) Stonehenge Deciphered: Astonishing Secrets of the Iconic Henge. Three Pools Publishing.
Ruggles, C.L.N. (1999) Astronomy in Prehistoric Britain and Ireland. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Thomas, H.H. (1923) ‘The source of the stones of Stonehenge’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 9, pp. 311–331.
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