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Having just a couple of months ago burrowed my way into the center of one of the world's most famous Neolithic barrows, more specifically a passage tomb at Newgrange (ca. 3200 BC, older than Stonehenge, which I had visited the previous week, and the Egyptian pyramids, which I have yet to behold in person) in County Meath, Ireland with J. P. Mallory, Indo-European archeolinguist and author of In Search of the Irish Dreamtime:  Archaeology and Early Irish Literature (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016), all 6'7" of him and 6'2" of me, making it a difficult crawl / squeeze for the two of us, I was keen to read this article:

To Historians and Tourists, It’s a Mysterious Ancient Burial Site. It Used to Be My Playground.
Author Oliver Smith spent many childhood days exploring a prehistoric mound near his grandparents’ house in Wales. As an adult, he found himself irresistibly drawn back to it—and other sites like it.
By Oliver Smith. WSJ (Feb. 12, 2025)

I spent many childhood holidays with my grandparents, in a pebble-dashed house in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch*, North Wales. The village has the second-longest place name in the world (losing out to a hill in New Zealand**), and one can often find tourists at the train station, posing for photos next to the station sign, which is almost as long as the trains that stop there.

Fewer visitors make their way to a curious mound a few fields southwest of the village, not far from a narrow sea strait: a place which once served as a kind of childhood playground for me.

The mound had a grassy slope you could roll down until you felt nauseous. A gloomy tunnel mouth, lined with slabs, revealed nooks where you could hide from parents or grandparents who were insisting it was time to come home. If you dared proceed farther down the tunnel, you saw the mound was hollow: inside was a small, damp chamber, filled with spider webs, crooked stones and other prompts for childhood nightmares. To a 6-year-old, it seemed like a human-sized version of a badger’s den.

Absorbed as I was then in childhood make-believe, I was uncertain what the mound really was and who built it. But I knew it was old—possibly even older, I thought incredulously, than my grandparents and the antique furniture that filled their house.

I paid another visit to this little hillock a few months ago, late one fall afternoon. A cold wind blew off the strait, shaking the last leaves from the trees. A muddy path led to an information board—installed since my early visits—which explained that this was Bryn Celli Ddu (meaning “the hill of the dark grove”), a 5,000-year-old tomb.

It’s one of the best preserved of the Neolithic “long barrows” that line Europe’s Atlantic coast, cited as the world’s oldest widespread tradition of stone architecture. Archaeologists have found human bones inside, along with arrowheads, mussel shells and other flotsam of prehistoric lives. The mound is a relic of an age when humans chose to settle down and farm the land, a place connected with the invention of “home.” For me, the mound and its surrounds represent home on a personal level. My mother has traced her family tree back to villages nearby, where the trail runs cold.

Over the past few years I have been drawn to places like this. I have stomped across farmland and moorlands, in England, Ireland and France, to visit standing stones, henges and other prehistoric sites. In bookstores, I have sought out British Ordnance Survey maps, on which such remains are marked in a deliciously sinister Gothic script. The places I’ve visited have origins that straddle many millennia, but they typically share a few common features. A half-legible information board. A silence interrupted by the creak of an iron gate, or the chug of a distant tractor.

I have also lured my young family, on various pretexts, to ancient sites. One summer afternoon, at the Nympsfield Long Barrow in southern England, my 3-year-old son injured himself climbing a stone structure. Later, at the hospital, one nurse pressed ice on a ping-pong ball-sized bump on his forehead. Another wrote “Neolithic Megalith” on the paperwork describing the injury.

There’s a reason I keep returning. Prehistoric sites, by definition, date from a time before written history. Bryn Celli Ddu, Nympsfield and others were almost certainly sacred places—and yet they come with no scripture, insist on no ritual. They accommodate pilgrims like me who struggle with the rigidities of organized faith, but suspect answers can be discerned in the soil and stone. Indeed, they make no demands of their congregation of dog walkers and picnickers. Only that your imagination fills the blanks that archaeology cannot, and animates the scene with the ghosts of the pious, present here long ago. The quietness of these places can be kindling for spells of deep thought.

*Translates into English as "St. Mary's Church in the hollow of white hazel near a rapid whirlpool and the Church of St. Tysilio near the red cave".  The 58 characters include 7 digraphs, so it consists of only 51 letters in the Welsh language. (source)

**TaumatawhakatangihangakoauauoTamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu located 6kms outside of a small village called Porangahau, Central Hawkes Bay, Aotearoa/New Zealand.  (official website)  Maori name that translates into English as "The summit where Tamatea, the man with the big knees, the climber of mountains, the land-swallower who travelled about, played his nose flute to his loved one".  (source)

Selected readings

• "Eyjafjallajökull fail" (4/16/10)
• "Another jökull heard from?" (6/13/10)
• "Eyjafjallajökull FTW" (4/27/10)
• "Jökull of the year" (5/22/11)
• "Long words" (6/25/18)

[Thanks to June Teufel Dreyer]

February 15, 2025 @ 8:28 am · Filed by Victor Mair under Spelling, Toponymy, Words words words

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