Pentre Ifan & the Preseli Bluestones: Exploring Wales’ Ancient Dolmens, Myth & the Bluestones of Stonehenge.

To the land of sky, water, and Bluestone magic

Welcome to Stone Temple Gardening — digging into the deep soils of prehistory to cultivate new understandings of the ancient past.

Pentre Ifan Neolithic Dolmen, Preseli Hills, Pembrokeshire

Today’s post turns toward a remarkable corner of the British prehistoric landscape: the Preseli Mountains of West Wales. Bound to Stonehenge through the Bluestones, Preseli holds within it a constellation of dolmens and other ancient places. This post follows my earlier thoughts about the Gors Fawr stone circle and the discovery there of a rare, lost polissoir — a stone once used to grind and sharpen Neolithic axes.

Our pilgrimage to Preseli began, as many good journeys do, almost by accident. A few spare places opened on a private out-of-hours tour of Stonehenge with Professor Terence Meaden, arranged by Hugh Newman of Megalithomania. We booked on impulse, expecting only a single evening among the stones. But one night became two, and soon our modest plan unfurled into a two-week voyage from Wessex chalk to Welsh slate — from the sarsen plain to the bluestone hills — tracing the journey the stones themselves may once have taken.

I made a video of the Stonehenge Sun Temple lecture here and a blog post here.

Professor Terence Meaden giving a talk at Stonehenge

Before travelling west, we spent a day at Avebury and its surrounding monuments. I filmed at West Kennet Long Barrow, among stone-faces that seem to peer from lichen-flecked sarsens, and along the long, sinuous Avenue, where an animistic imagination still dozes in the grass. Three short films from that visit now sit on my YouTube channel: no talking heads, only ambient sound, captions, and close observation. See Here.

(This project is part of my broader attempt to approach the prehistoric world not as a dataset to be extracted, nor as a silent museum of fossilised facts gathering dust in an archive, but as an ongoing conversation between human perception and the land itself. Rocks, weather, and the wider landscape are not passive backdrops; they are active participants in shaping how we understand the past.

“Let the stones speak for themselves” has become a loose guiding principle — though I do allow myself a measure of explanation when needed).

The Cove at Avebury — two of the largest surviving sarsen stones within the Neolithic henge, thought to form part of a ritual enclosure.

From Salisbury, we turned west toward the village of St Dogmaels in Cardiganshire — a place of sloping roofs, tidal light, and river air. Rather than follow the fast coastal road, we wound over the high ground, a succession of narrow lanes rising and falling through quiet hills, where sheep drift across the verges and the wind presses with a steady insistence. The road asks patience, its rhythm closer to walking than hurried travel. Looking out across the Preseli uplands, I thought of the bluestones’ imagined journey, if they travelled by land: our route, in reverse, tracing the path of ancient movers of stone. Yet doubt followed that thought. Having read a pre release copy of Alun G. Rees Stonehenge Deciphered I was persuaded that the sea seems the more natural avenue, a voyage of tide and strength, not the slow, bruising pull of sledges through mud and heather. Still, the high road to Preseli had its own quiet pull, drawing us inland toward the heart of the hills.

The Blessing Stone at St Dogmaels — a moss-clad bluestone beside a spring, traditionally used to bless the fishing fleet.

St Dogmaels: Speaking Stones, Spirit Toned...

On our first evening in St Dogmaels, we wandered toward the estuary as the tide had turned. The village lay quiet — sloped roofs, salt air, a soft, rivered light. Across the water, Cardigan rolled along the bank like a stone tongue in the mouth of the River Teifi, the current lifting its voice and carrying it toward the green depths of the Irish Sea. The air smelt of salt, mud, and late-summer rain; the river’s surface held the last colours of the day. There we found the Blessing Stone — a rounded bluestone boulder at the water’s edge, smoothed by the centuries. Beneath it, a spring trickles into the Teifi; clergy once stood upon the stone to bless the fishing fleet before their dangerous hunt for the sinuous silver shoals swimming below. Even now, the river seems to pause at its foot, as if listening, holding the memory of those quiet invocations as it carries them out toward the open sea.

Low tide on the River Teifi near St Dogmaels, where a small boat sits quietly on the mudflats beneath the Blessing Stone.

That the spirit of Preseli, which we had greeted at Stonehenge barely twenty-four hours earlier, should first lead us to a named bluestone boulder with both history and a voice felt like more than chance. When I spoke there, my words returned — a clean, uncanny echo rising not from the air but from the river itself doubled and delayed, as though returning from another time. Standing in the falling light, the river murmuring and the echo answering, it felt as though the land itself were replying, a threshold crossed, a quiet invitation to begin.

We had chosen St Dogmaels simply because we liked the look of the accommodation (which proved excellent), knowing nothing of what waited, only that it lay within the landscape we hoped to explore. Yet one small coincidence followed another. Such moments often appear when you loosen the grip of the purely rational and let the land be read more fully, where direction, chance, memory, and resonance intermingle. It was as if, in opening ourselves to the land, something quiet and old stepped forward from the shadows of time to greet us.

Since choosing to walk a more poetic, sensory path into the deep past (a path I believe that sets my work apart) such synchronicities have surfaced with curious frequency, as though the landscape were quietly nudging us onward. It was a fitting overture to what lay ahead: an echo in the stillness, the faintest stirring of something ancient just out of sight.

By morning the weather had turned. We climbed into the rain-veiled uplands, the road glistening, clouds snagged on the hills. At Gors Fawr, my search for the long-lost polissoir began anew beneath drifting mist; and on that sodden moor the horizon itself seemed to draw breath and wake. I have already written about that search → Gors Farw.

I made a video too. Here.

My photo of the Gors Fawr polissoir — a grooved stone thought to have been used to polish Neolithic stone axes.

Neolithic and Bronze Age Context

To understand the dolmens and quarries of Preseli, we must first step into a landscape already ancient before the originalstones were raised.

Around 3800–3000 BC, the first farming communities moved through this corner of west Wales, clearing pockets of woodland amid the glacial uplands with their stone axes. The monuments they raised — chambered structures such as Pentre Ifan, Llech y Drybedd, and Carreg Coetan Arthur — were not simply places for the dead, but markers of presence and belonging: the architecture of memory set within sight of moor, sea, and mountain.

Gors Farw stone circle with Preselli Bluestone ridge in distance

The Preseli Hills form the heart of this ritual topography. Their spotted dolerite — the famed bluestone — was prized enough to be quarried and moved across extraordinary distances. At Carn Meini and Carn Goedog, archaeologists have traced extraction scars and half-shaped pillars dating to the later third millennium BC, suggesting these outcrops were working quarries long before Stonehenge’s inner circle was set in place. This is important as it helps us understand why some were moved to Stonehenge.

Whether the stones travelled overland or, more likely, by sea along the western and southern coasts, their origin here ties the Preseli landscape to one of prehistory’s great undertakings.

A pair of Preseli bluestones standing within the heart of Stonehenge, surrounded by towering sarsen trilithons.

Folk memory helps us here by keeping a stubborn ember of their sacred use alive: that water running over bluestones borrows the virtue of healing from them. Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in his Historyof the Kings of Britain (1136) claimed the natives used thecstones by washing them so their run-off could be used to heal the sick, a legend wrapped around Stonehenge’s bluestones.[1] Modern archaeologists note how the healing motif still clings to these pillars; Darvill and Wainwright even cast Stonehenge as a prehistoric Lourdes.[2]

Whether such powers can be proven scarcely matters. In Pembrokeshire lore, springs and wells in bluestone country were remembered as therapeutic places, their waters prized because they rose through the same spotted dolerite.[3]

For a writer threading the landscape mythology at Preseli’s edge, this is a usable inheritance: folk memory as a living archive, a way to reach back through noise of time and sift a signal from the deep past, where stone and water still seem to speak in a near-forgotten tongue.

Preseli’s significance is not only geological. Its hills are inscribed with dense webs of myth and continuity: Arthurian echoes, tales of giants and saints, memories of goddesses, monsters, faries and wolves. These stories preserve, in transformed language, the same awe once expressed through megaliths — a reverence for the landscape and its stones as living substance, and for horizon and water as thresholds between worlds.

In this post (and those to follow) I retrace some of these stones across the Preseli landscape — from Pentre Ifan’s floating capstone to the wolf-haunted valley of Gwal-y-Filiast, and finally to the quarry heights of Carn Meini — seeking how matter, myth, and memory converge in this landscape.

Pentre Ifan: The Hinge of Preseli

Photograph I took from beneath the capstone of Pentre Ifan in Pembrokeshire, Wales, showing the dolerite support stone and looking towards the Irish Sea beyond the far ridge.

The quiet road to Pentre Ifan climbs through farmland that feels softly antique: small fields, crooked hedges, the smell of rain on slate. The monument waits high on the slope, its dark capstone tilted down the valley like a ship’s prow ploughing into a green sea. Th3e archaeologists suggest these dolmen monuments were burial chambers covered with a mound. No mound remains, only perhaps a skeleton of intention: three uprights supporting twenty ton of dolerite, their tips barely touching the stone’s long belly. Step closer and the balance feels improbable — weight turned to poise, gravity briefly suspended, bathing in the afterglow of forgotten dawns.

The weather had lifted; the stones gleamed as if half-alive and as slick as the skin of an adder. Low mist drifted across the valley, shuttering and unshuttering the distant shine of Newport Bay before dispersing in the clear light of a beautiful day. I followed the capstone's gaze down the valley towards where the land loosens between the earth and sky, before drifting into a dreaming sea.

The capstone itself is roughly five metres long, two-and-a-half wide, and just under a metre thick — an immense wedge resting on three slender uprights, its estimated 20 ton roof raised two-and-a-half metres above the ground.

Using my senses, I stopped and reflected upon the feel of the site. My thought became more reflective beneath that hovering stone and I felt the familiar doubling these old places conjure: enclosure and release, descent and flight bound together in a single breath. It was almost as if I stood upon a hinge of time, a dream pinned beneath granite — the moment held taut as a drawn bow, waiting for its phenomenological arrow to fly.

Pentre Ifan — Wales’ finest Neolithic portal dolmen, its mighty capstone poised above slender uprights on the Preseli slopes.

On the skyline to the east, the jagged teeth of Carn Ingli — the Mountain of Angels — bite at the pale air. The dolmen’s great stone was quarried from that high ridge; it is as though the parent crag still keeps watch over its wandering child below.

Some say the mountain is a place of healing; that bright apparitions have stirred along its heights, and that strange magnetic quirks can pull a compass from true — as if the ground here still beats to another, older measure beneath our feet.

At Pentre Ifan, the Preseli bluestones are still dreaming.

Pentre Ifan Preseli Bluestones

Pentre Ifan is catalogued as a portal dolmen, built of Meini's spotted dolerite around 3500 BC — one of the earliest stone monuments in Wales. Excavations found traces of a chamber once covered by an earthen mound, but little to suggest a conventional tomb: few bones, no grave goods, only the gesture of construction. These platforms feel less like containers than communicants — thresholds between worlds, performative spaces where shape, sound, and story entwined to join earth and sky.

I walked slowly around its giant form, watching how the light shifted on the wet surface, how the lines of hill and sea gathered beneath its span. The sun had replaced the rain; a brief silence followed. For a moment the monument seemed to hover not just in space but in time — between what was built and what is remembered, between matter and meaning.

The serpent/dragon-profile capstone of Pentre Ifan, poised above its uprights, with Carn Meini — birthplace of the bluestones — framed beyond.

Pentre Ifan: A Serpent in Stone?

Viewed from one angle, the capstone narrows toward its rightward tip, as though to sniff the wind. The stone does not simply rest; it poises. Its front edge tapers to a rounded snout and a distinct eyebrow ridge, while the mass behind recalls a body. The rock is stippled like a hide, and the slight downward tilt gives the uncanny impression of a creature sniffing the air and waiting. Whether this resemblance is chance or intention is impossible to say, but the animistic eye finds a shape, a simulcra, a reptile held in stone, locally it would be an adder or a dragon? The quiet watcher at the threshold of worlds, with the Carn of Angels framed beneath its belly?

The Dragon Stone of Waun Mawn

Welsh folklore grants the dragon/serpent a curious status. The indiginous adder — nadredd — was feared and respected in equal measure. To harm one without need risked misfortune; to meet one on a path could signal change or danger. Some trace the word derwydd — druid — to associations with the serpent, a memory of “serpent-wisdom” embedded in language. The adder was not merely a creature of the hedge, but a messenger between realms — living beneath yet moving above, speaking for both land and unseen alike. The nearby Waun Mawn standing stones and destroyed circle (an alleged source of the Stonehenge bluestones robbed out and moved to Salisbury Plain (according to arcaeologist Mike Parker-Pearson) has its own serpant like stone called the "Dragon Stone" in Welsh.

The rear of Pentre Ifan, where its tall uprights brace the weight of the great capstone against the Preseli landscape.

A portal tomb is already a liminal chamber — a place where enclosure and release, descent and ascent lie in uneasy balance. To imagine a serpent at its entrance gives form to that tension: guardian, warning, teaching. In Welsh lore, the adder is also bound to healing — its shed skin a token of renewal, its presence by springs a sign of curative virtue. This resonates with the tradition that water running over Preseli bluestone absorbs virtue from the rock. Whether literal or not, the belief survives: stone, water, and serpent belonging to a single current of memory, ruminating on a thread of lost mythic power.

Seen in this light, the capstone’s serpent-like profile becomes more than a trick of perspective. It becomes a shape to engage with: an ancient communicant at the threshold of land and sky, life and death. Here the monument does what so many prehistoric places still manage — it draws us to wonder whether the old language, though long fled, still touches this world through stone. Might another lexicon lie just beneath the surface, unvoiced yet not entirely silent, waiting for the attentive eye to shed its opaque skin?

The Author at Pentre Ifan dragon shaped capstone : I should have had a shave!

The Mythic Geography of Pentre Ifan

Within a short walk of Pentre Ifan’s poised stones, the landscape folds through names that catch at the imagination. Brynberian — only a short breath from the dolmen’s flank — recalls Saint Berian’s holy pool, yet whispers of the Afanc, the mythic water-beast said to lurk in the Nevern’s peaty veins, drawing the unwary toward Annwn’s dim underworld. Here, where water gathers, an older anxiety seems to linger: a memory of river-rites and the quiet dread of deep places.

A stylised artistic depiction of the Afanc, the legendary Welsh water-monster often described as part-beaver, part-reptile. The creature rises from a misty river or bog pool, surrounded by dark water and moss-covered stone, evoking its association with the underworld realm of Annwn. The artwork reflects stories linked to the Nevern Valley and Brynberian near Pentre Ifan.

Nearby, Pentre Ifan Farm sits plain beneath the fields, giving way to Pentre Evan Wood — a small tangle once said to harbour the mythic Fae of the Tylwyth Teg, who dance beneath moonlit oaks, thinning the fabric of time. Bedd yr Afanc lies close by: a cracked gallery-grave for a monster itself. Its capstone lies like a jaw of tamed chaos, a reminder of older tales of wrestled waters and reclaimed land.

An Edwardian-style Art Nouveau illustration of the Tylwyth Teg — the fairy folk of Welsh lore — standing in a sunlit meadow, poised between beauty and the otherworld.

Taken together, these names and stories feel more than accident — a quiet skein binding water, wood, and stone. Places where pools breed creatures and woods guard thresholds; where the Preseli’s deeper current knots saint and monster, folklore and geology. Myth here is not garnish but sediment — a way the land remembers.

Archaeoastronomy

According to independent researcher Robin Heath, in Bluestone Magic Pentre Ifan may have been intentionally aligned upon the midwinter solstice sunset around c. 3500 BCE. In a nearby field at Corlan Samson, a large recumbent stone bears two distinctive perforations and appears to point toward the dolmen at the location where the solstice sun would set. When the sightline is extended beyond Pentre Ifan, the setting point corresponds with an outcrop on the far left flank of Carn Meibion Owen in the distance. Whether intentional or coincidental, the relationship between monument, recumbent stone, and horizon feature adds further weight to the argument that Pentre Ifan participates in a broader astronomical landscape.

Conclusion: The Dragon's Gaze

My thoughts drift on, then softly come to rest

Here stone keeps counsel in its patient hold

Half-door, half-dream, it answers no one’s quest

A creature waiting where the worlds grow old 

Looking beneath the great capstone of Pentre Ifan, its tapering ‘serpent’ profile aligns toward the distant Preseli ridge — birthplace of Stonehenge’s bluestones.

Perhaps my animistic dreaming is the point I am most interested in here — the past does not always speak plainly. It must be read through the grain of rock, the set of the horizon, and those fugitive moments when shape hints at spirit and the earth seems to breathe story. That horizon framed in its own stone beneath the capstone may be memory made visible — the monument glancing homeward to the mountain that birthed it. A mythic representation in stone of the world view of its builders.

If Gors Fawr opened the conversation, then Pentre Ifan gave it form: earth aspiring skyward, presence made articulate. From here the path would lead west and south, to smaller cromlechs tucked into their fields, each repeating the gesture in quieter keys.

From Pentre Ifan’s poised threshold, the land called us onward—not in straight lines, but in the curve of a river’s bend or the sheep-track’s meander. A mile or two west, where the fields give way to bracken and the Nevern’s murmur grows peaty and insistent, Llech y Drybedd waits like a fallen giant’s bone: a single capstone sprawled across two low uprights, its surface etched not by tools but by the patient grammar of frost and rain. Here the hinge tightens, the serpent uncoils further into earthbound repose, and the conversation deepens—stone speaking to stone across the valley, pulling us toward the quieter dolmens that follow, each a verse in Preseli’s unfinished song. What secrets does the Drybedd hold in its shadowed cradle, and how might its recumbent weight teach us to listen for the wolves in the next hollow? The path unfurls; the stones oblige.

Join me for part two of my Welsh exploration next time on Stone Temple Gardening.

In Text References

[1]: https://www.yorku.ca/inpar/geoffrey_thompson.pdf?utm_source=chatgpt.com "History of the Kings of Britain"

[2]: https://archaeology.co.uk/articles/features/message-in-the-stones.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Message in the Stones"

[3]: https://brian-mountainman.blogspot.com/2012/03/holy-wells-and-sacred-springs.html?utm_source=chatgpt.com "Holy wells and sacred springs"

Heath, R. (2010) Bluestone Magic: A Guide to the Prehistoric Monuments of West Wales. Bluestone Press.