Unearthing the Ancient: Sacred Blueschist and Quartz the Geological and Mythic Heart of Bryn Celli Ddu Anglesey.

Neolithic Art: The Carved Stone at Bryn Celli Ddu Anglesey

Welcome back to Stone Temple Gardening, where we dig deep to cultivate new understandings of the ancient past!

Unearthing the Ancient—this is the fourth chapter of my solstice journey through the sacred landscape of Anglesey, North Wales. Over these posts I’ve been tracing how stone, light, and spirit converge at the Neolithic tomb of Bryn Celli Ddu, revealing not just archaeology, but a living dialogue between past and present.

In Part 1: Stone, Sun, and Spirit, I shared my pilgrimage from Leicestershire to Anglesey, where I stood inside the Neolithic passage tomb of Bryn Celli Ddu as the midsummer sun lit up a quartz-veined slab—a golden moment that awakened what I call my inner Neolithic eye. Read Here

Summer Solstice Sunlight in the Chamber of Bryn Celli Ddu

In Part 2: Has a Lost Stone Circle Been Found?  I joined Dr. Mike Woods’ excavation on the ridge above the tomb. There, we uncovered a Bronze Age ring ditch, a buried standing stone—perhaps part of a lost circle—and a carefully placed inscribed river pebble: a face from the past, a synchronicitous find that spoke powerfully to me. That same day I turned to the source of Bryn Celli Ddu’s sacred stone itself: a quartz-rich blueschist outcrop alive with its rock art and crystalline shimmer. Read Here

The Rediscovered Buried Monolith at Tydden Bach

In Part 3: Exploring the Neolithic Heart of Anglesey, I reflected on phenomenology of place—an approach that values not only soil and stone, but also how these landscapes move us through the senses. It is a way of seeing that allows the ancient animistic worldview to stir once more. Read Here.

The Gorsedd at Bryn Celli Ddu

Now, in this fourth instalment, I turn more deeply to that phenomenological gaze. How do stones, light, and story work together to shape experience? What can the shimmer of quartz and the gravity of blueschist reveal about the Neolithic imagination? And why do these places continue to touch us so profoundly across five millennia?

Join me as we step into this layered landscape—part excavation, part reverie—to listen for what endures.

To begin our exploration of sacred landscapes through the lense of Bryn Celli Ddu, we must first examine the very ground below our feet. The material reality of the ritual landscape.

Blueschist Quarry

Neolithic: The New Stone Age

Stone was crucial in the Neolithic period (c. 10,000–2,000 BCE) for its practical and spiritual significance. Its durability enabled the creation of advanced tools like axes, sickles, and grinding stones, supporting agriculture, hunting, and food processing, which underpinned settled communities. Stone also formed monumental structures like megalithic tombs and stone circles, such as Stonehenge, which held profound spiritual meaning, serving as ceremonial sites for rituals, burials, and astronomical observations. Neolithic people often imbued stones with sacred qualities, believing they connected the earthly and divine, with some stones chosen for their unique shapes or locations to honour ancestors or deities. This dual role of stone as both practical and spiritual was central to the Neolithic transition from hunter gatherer to agrarian societies.

Close Up of the Blueschist Sun Stone With Pink Quartz

Blueschist Rock: The Heartbeat of Anglesey’s Sacred landscape

Though all sorts of different rock types were used in the Neolithic, the site at Bryn Celli Ddu is unique in its geology, and this is crucial to understanding the ritual landscape.

Anglesey cradles a rare and mesmerising rock: blueschist. Forged under immense geological pressure, this metamorphic stone gleams with rose-quartz veins that run through it like rivers of light. Unique within the British Isles, it appears only in a narrow band across the island. At the heart of the Bryn Celli Ddu landscape lies the Gorsedd, a great outcrop of blueschist that was quarried by the Neolithic builders. From here they took stone for the island’s first circle: its foundational burial, the rare carved stone placed above, and the ring of standing stones. When that circle was later reworked into Bryn Celli Ddu’s Bronze Age passage tomb, blueschist was once again chosen—set into its entrance, passage, and chamber. One striking pillar still stands within the chamber, towering over the original consecration burial of a child’s ear bone, as if guarding it.

Carved Blueschist Stone in Chamber: Aligned to the Winter Solstice Sunrise

Remarkably, this chamber stone aligns with the winter solstice sunrise, the first rays emerging through the cleft of the Llanberis Pass beside Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon), the line going through the burial to the stone. Folklore tells that Yr Wyddfa holds the bones of a giant and links the mountain to King Arthur and other tales. Rising pyramid-like, it is the highest peak in the British Isles outside Scotland.

Bryn Celli Ddu and Snowdonia. Llanberis Pass is the "V" Shape in Centre

The sacred reach of the Gorsedd extends further: its blueschist provided the material for the monoliths of nearby Tyddyn Bach, both standing and buried. Below, in the same field as the Gorsedd stands the rounded, solstice-aligned Sun Stone, its surface richly veined with rosy quartz. Rare, radiant, and spiritually charged, blueschist was more than a building material—it was a medium of power, a bridge to the divine.

But why?

If my argument holds, the answer lies not just in its scarcity but in its nature.

Quartz is central to Bryn Celli Ddu’s sacred design. At midsummer, sunlight streams through the passage, striking a quartz-veined slab in the inner chamber, casting fleeting shapes: first a hafted axe, then an axe head—potent symbols of Neolithic ritual power. A warning: the chamber, reconstructed in the 1930s, may not perfectly replicate its original form, though accounts suggest careful work. If accurate, these solstice-lit glyphs were likely intentional, crafted by Neolithic minds to mark the ritual year’s midpoint. The quartz-rich stone, deliberately chosen, enhances this spectacle.

Summer Solstice Sunrise in the Chamber: Quartz to Left

The Power of Quartz

Quartz’s unique properties amplified its significance. Piezoelectric, it emits small electrical charges or faint light when struck or compressed. Its reflective, luminous quality likely captivated ancient builders. Neolithic communities across Britain prized quartz for its radiant glow, often incorporating it into monuments like Newgrange, where quartz-rich stones framed tomb entrances. These were not mere adornments but transformative elements, turning portals into shimmering thresholds between the earthly and spiritual realms (Sheridan, 2010). To enter the temple was to exit the living world and enter mythical cave of the ancestors.

The ancient Greeks viewed quartz, as "eternal ice" forged by divine hands, symbolising clarity, balance, and spiritual protection. Crafted into wands and spheres, it was integral to rituals. In the Roman Empire, quartz crystal balls were widely used for divination, a practice later deemed heretical by the early Christian Church. This reverence for quartz transcends Neolithic and Classical Europe. In Aboriginal Australia, quartz is revered as "solidified light" wielded by shamans (Elkin, 1977). In Panama, it served as a spirit tool (Cooke, 1984), while in ancient Egypt, sacred objects were fashioned from it. Today, quartz retains its sacred significance in pagan and New Age practices worldwide.

Therefore, it is not a stretch of the imagination to argue that at Bryn Celli Ddu the sacred use of quartz-rich blueschist was deliberate. To the practical eye, it was simply nearby. But to a Neolithic mind—and through a phenomenological lens—it radiated a spiritual force—linking the tomb to the Gorsedd, and its perceived spiritual power. The monumental henge tomb and satellite sites are all here because of it. The Gorsedd stood out from the landscape like a stone giant pulsing with frozen lightning. And along with the other two geographical markers, the river and the mountains, that make up the sacred trinity of Bryn Celli Ddu, it marked this place with the touch of the divine.

The Gorsedd

Yet the land’s sacredness is not only in its stones but in the moments when light, time, and human presence align. My solstice journey, the heart of this series of essays, brought me face-to-face with this convergence. During my time here, after standing in the sun-lit chamber of Bryn Celli Ddu and tracing the Gorsedd’s ancient carved cupstones, I felt the landscape’s pulse quicken, urging me to explore its deeper truths through a weekend of encounters that would reshape my understanding.  Even now, as I revisit those days, I feel their tremor. The sun in the chamber had set pebbles rolling in the craggy highlands of my imagination—and rocks were about to fall.

The Sunstone Looking Towards the Gorsedd.

The story of Bryn Celli Ddu is not only one of geology and monumentality, but of presence—of how stone, light, and human imagination converge to create meaning. The quartz-veined blueschist, born of immense pressure and rare in these islands, was no ordinary material. It shaped the island’s first circle, was chosen again for the passage tomb, and still gleams in the chamber where solstice light strikes with deliberate force. In its shimmer and weight the builders found both a tool and a sign, a way of binding earth to sky, the living to the dead, the human to the divine.

But stone is never mute. As I walked from the chamber to the Gorsedd, from carved cup marks to solstice-lit quartz, I began to sense presences not easily contained by archaeology alone. These were more than markers of ritual; they seemed to carry faces, gestures, and whispers of agency. The Neolithic mind, I suspect, was attuned to such forms—not inert blocks of geology, but beings that looked back.

In the next essay, I turn to these presences more directly: the three faces I encountered in Bryn Celli Ddu’s landscape, simulacra shaped as much by perception as by stone. There we will enter the realm of animistic spirits, where rocks are not passive matter but active participants in a dialogue that still resonates across five thousand years.

Dr Alexander Peach

August 2025

Stone Temple Gardening

Select Bibliography

Cooke, R. G. (1984). “Archaeological Research in Central and Eastern Panama: A Review of Some Problems and Prospects”. In F. W. Lange (Ed.), Recent Developments in Isthmian Archaeology (pp. 25–44). Oxford: BAR International Series. 

- Elkin, A. P. (1977). Aboriginal Men of High Degree. St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press.

Sheridan, A. (2010). “The Neolithisation of Britain and Ireland: The Big Picture”. In B. Finlayson & G. Warren (Eds.), Landscapes in Transition (pp. 89–105). Oxford: Oxbow Books.

Part One: Unearthing the Sacred Heart of Anglesey  https://www.stonetemplegardening.com/post/bryn-celli-ddu-unearthing-the-sacred-heart-of-anglesey-part-one   

  A sweeping introduction to Bryn Celli Ddu’s archaeological complexity and its place within Anglesey’s sacred geography.

 Part Two: Unearthing the Sacred Heart of Neolithic Anglesey Part Two  https://www.stonetemplegardening.com/post/bryn-celli-ddu-unearthing-the-sacred-heart-of-the-neolithic-anglesey-part-2   

  Delves deeper into the site’s ritual landscape, exploring lost cairns, child burials, and the symbolic resonance of hazel and stone.

 Part Three: Stone, Sky, River and Mountain  https://www.stonetemplegardening.com/post/stone-sky-river-and-mountain-the-sacred-geography-of-bryn-celli-ddu-part-three   

  Investigates the elemental geography—blueschist outcrops, sacred rivers, and mountain alignments—that may have sanctified the site long before its monuments were raised.

 Part Four: Unveiling the Cosmic Mysteries of Bryn Celli Ddu https://www.stonetemplegardening.com/post/unveiling-the-cosmic-mysteries-of-bryn-celli-ddd-explore-the-celestial-secrets-of-the-neolithic-sol   

  Explores Bryn Celli Ddu’s solstice alignments, archaeoacoustics, and light phenomena, proposing a multisensory ritual experience encoded in stone.

 🌞 Solstice Posts: Light, Spirit, and Discovery

These posts document personal pilgrimages and recent discoveries, offering a phenomenological and poetic counterpoint to the scholarly essays.

Part One, Stone, Sun, and Spirit: My Solstice Journey to Bryn Celli Ddu  https://www.stonetemplegardening.com/post/stone-sun-and-spirit-my-solstice-journey-to-bryn-celli-ddu   

  A vivid account of witnessing the midsummer sunrise within the tomb, blending personal reflection with archaeological insight.

 Part Two Has a Lost Stone Circle Been Found?: Exciting New Discoveries in Wales  https://www.stonetemplegardening.com/post/has-a-lost-stone-circle-been-found-at-bryn-celli-ddu-exciting-new-discoveries-in-wales   

  Chronicles the excavation near Tyddyn Bach and the possible rediscovery of a lost ceremonial circle, expanding the known ritual landscape.

Together, these posts form a tapestry—archaeological, experiential, and cosmological—through which Bryn Celli Ddu emerges not just as a monument, but as a living dialogue between land, light, and lineage.