While I’ve been travelling across South Wales with archaeologist Dewi Bowen, drawing megaliths in the ancient Neolithic landscape, we’ve been accompanied by film maker Melvyn Williams and he’s been editing up short films as we go along. Here’s his latest instalment in the story of The Hunt / Yr Helfa.
Drawing the King’s Quoit
All the work I’m doing will eventually be featured in a solo show in The Worker’s Gallery in the Rhondda Valley in September. If you want to know more, please click here.
Drawing ‘The King’s Quoit’ from another angle, I could see underneath the capstone, through the inky darkness below the huge rock into the bright sunlight beyond.
The shape reminded me of being in a cave, looking out through the entrance and it occurred to me that the ancient people who created these monuments might have lived in caves, or at least sought sanctuary and shelter in them and I wonder if they echoed this experience when they built their stone megaliths across the landscape?
The King’s Quoit is situated on the cliff path above the glorious beach at Manorbier on the South Pembrokeshire coast in Wales. It’s a sub-megalithic type, where the back of the capstone rests directly on the ground without an orthostat supporting it. I drew with carbon and white conte crayon onto Fabriano paper that I had prepared in advance with my homemade walnut ink. I had originally done a very large drawing in the ink but didn’t like it so I ripped it down into smaller pieces that would fit onto my portable drawing board. I liked working over an existing image – I don’t like working directly onto white paper, it’s intimidating.
It was chilly and very windy on the cliff – here I am drawing in the short video below….
This drawing is available to buy in my Artfinder gallery here.
Husb and I went for a drive on Easter Monday, exploring some of the South Wales coastline that we hadn’t seen before, the lovely beach of Manorbier / Maenorbŷr in South Pembrokeshire. It’s a very ancient settlement with local evidence of flint microliths from the Mesolithic and Neolithic ages and this magnificent dolmen, The King’s Quoit, looking out over the sea from the cliff path. There are Bronze Age burial mounds, an Iron Age enclosure and evidence of Anglo Saxon farming. The imposing castle and parish church are Norman. It has a railway station and can be reached by train on the lovely West Wales line.
Sometimes the Welsh, Maenorbŷr, is translated as Manor of Pŷr, but an alternative meaning I have seen is ‘Holy (or sacred) Stone’, which would make sense, given the magnificence of this Neolithic burial chamber. The weather was gorgeous, sunny and bright and the beach was busy with families enjoying their Easter break. But it was quite cold and blustery up on the cliff where I settled down to draw the dolmen – you can see what it was like in this short video.
I did this drawing in carbon and white conte crayon onto Fabriano Accademica paper that I had prepared with my home-made walnut ink. This is now for sale in my Artfinder gallery, please click here to see more images of it.
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