 Ty Mawr - front view of the collapsed chamber. |
|
Just a short
distance northeast of the town of Llanfair Pwllgwyngyll and 900 metres
north of the Menai Strait the remains of Ty Mawr present rather a sorry
sight - the chambered
tomb has collapsed leaving a pile of stones but thankfully these
have not been removed to be broken up for building material as many
other monuments must have been. Enough remains for us to reconstruct
what the chamber would have looked like, a large slab-like capstone
measuring about 3.5 metres by 2.5 metres rests on a pair of fallen uprights
each about 1.3 metres long that would formerly supported it and formed
the sides of the chamber (the stones resting at an angle to the left
and right above). There would have been at least one other upright supporting
stone to the rear of the chamber and it is probable that the removal
of this stone would have lead to the collapse of the structure, this
certainly occurred before 1873 when the drawing at the bottom of the
page was produced which shows Ty Mawr in almost exactly the same state
as it is today. The chamber would have thus resembled sites such as
Bodowyr and a sill stone (the stone near the
centre above on which the capstone partly rests) to the east suggests
that Ty Mawr was a passage grave. Originally this sill stone would have
marked the entrance to the chamber at the end of a sort passageway from
the edge of a covering stone cairn
- the cairn material has now been removed but was marked on early maps
and is thought to have measured about 15 metres by 10 metres.
Date : Neolithic |
 Side view of of the chamber looking northeast. |
 Illustration from Archaeologia Cambrensis (1873). The views roughly correspond with the two photographs above. |
