Site [sic] Unseen

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It never ceases to amaze me how much about the world we inhabit there is to know: no matter how much education, formal, self or otherwise we have. No matter how many books we read, documentaries we watch, lectures we attend; the world we think familiar, everyday and mundane can offer surprises at every turn. I've started reading the english version of John Davies' "A History of Wales" recently - not a rewriting in English from an English perspective - of the original Welsh edition, but, as he says in the preface to my edition: '...there seemed to be a demand among English-speakers to read what was already available to Welsh-speakers. I decided to do no more than translate the original...' I'm glad he chose that path.

I am still firmly entrenched in stone-and-iron-age Wales at the moment; and so at the very start of my journey with this book, and I was struck by a reference to an archaeological site, the modern topography of which I am only too familiar; that was discovered only in 1960, via the revelations of aerial photography picking up crop circles from altitude, on the site of what was to become a place I would visit every day for sixteen years of my life whilst working for BT/Openreach: the BT TEC yard at Llandygai Industrial Estate, which was built around 1966: the year I started secondary school in Birmingham, and the year before I first visited what has now been my home for most of my life.

The site was archaeologically excavated before the work on the site commenced and revealed the presence hinted at by the previous aerial surveys: two henges - clearly visible in the original photo pictured, along with several other structures of note. I had no idea of any of this until today. This site is the location of these significant henges, two of the earliest known out of around only seventy [to 1994, at least] such structures in Britain as whole, which makes it a pretty important part of the [pre]history of this archipelago of ours, and Gwynedd in particular. That it has been subsumed, unheralded, for the last half-century-plus by an industrial park's concrete and tarmac says much of our sense of scale and value toward such things, methinks...

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