Dolmen Hunter

A long time ago when I was a very young child, maybe six or seven years old, I used to play in a little river that ran through our farmyard. It was a lovely clean little river with crystal clear water. It was the stream that we drank from.

The bed of the stream was covered with pebbles of various sizes and colours. There were black and red and green ones from the alluvial farmlands upstream and white quartz and glittering granite from the distant mountains. It was even said that there was precious Irish gold in the stream. And all the pebbles were rounded and polished by the energy of the flowing water. I was captivated by the beauty of these small stones and spent hours foraging about on the riverbed selecting the nicest ones I could find. My chosen size was about that of a duck egg. I would put my selection on the river bank, flatten out a small area of sand and build little dolmens on it. Maybe three dark green eggs for supports and a flatter granite for a capstone. At that time of my life I don't think I had ever even heard the word "prehistoric". I didn't know that not twenty miles off was the real thing. The Brown's Hill Dolmen, with the heaviest capstone in Europe, an estimated one hundred tons! This yen to build small dolmens continued into adult life whenever the occasion seemed appropriate. When I was a young man I made a small garden and included a little dolmen made of bucket sized rocks. The last time I built a dolmen was a few years ago on Aberfraw beach at the ripe old age of sixty. This one even had a circular ditch and several alignments of standing stones! And then, as always, in came the tide.




Brown's Hill Dolmen