A Place Like No Other
About
​ West Wales is an archaeological treasure trove, littered with Neolithic standing stones, Bronze Age burial mounds and Iron Age forts. There are few places that bring you closer to the ancient people who inhabited the British Isles before the Romans arrived. ​​
Gwyn spent much of his childhood in West Wales and has an intimate knowledge of the landscape and its history. In the Celtic Dreamtime books he uses this insight to bring Iron Age Wales to life.
Locations
Most locations mentioned in the Dreamtime books are real places but I’ve made some changes to fit the plots. The Blue Cave, through which my twenty first century teenagers are transported to the Iron Age, is located near Abereiddy, a sheltered beach popular with holidaymakers.
pentre ifan where the eagle god of dinas mountain perches on the capstone of this burial chamber in kingslayer.
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clawdd y milwyr the iron age fort envisoned as maelog's stronghold in reflections in time.
My interest in the history of the area began many years ago when my wife and I first visited Castell Henllys, a reconstructed Iron Age settlement. Looking back, the germ of the Celtic Dreamtime books was conceived at Castell Henllys as I wandered amongst the thatched roundhouses and listened to re-enactors, dressed in period clothes.
West wales has a rich tradition of folklaw and many of the stories recorded in the mabinogi (a series of 12th century folk tales) are set in pembrokeshire. gazing at the ffyone falls it's easy to imagine a goddess emerging from the water.
Legend has it the falls are the fabled gateway
to the kingdom of anwyn, the otherworld ruled by arawn, a character in the mabinogi.
Ty canol wood, within sight of pentre ifan burial chamber is one of the few remaining examples of temperate rainforest in the northern hemisphere.
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The Celtic Dreamtime books are set in 350BC when the predominant religion in Wales was Druidism. The secretive Druids committed all their knowledge to memory and didn’t allow their beliefs to be recorded. After the Romans invaded Anglesey and massacred the druids in their sacred oak groves, they went on to ruthlessly suppress the religion. Tragically when the last Druid died, the poems and songs, which held the key to their beliefs, died with them.​
I am a Christian not a modern day Pagan, but Druidism fascinates me. It is the mystery that shrouds the cult that makes it such an interesting backdrop for a fantasy novel. the idea of a druid stalking teenagers and drawing them back to the Iron Age is pure fantasy, but the practise of using hallucinogenic fungi to contact the spirit world, is still observed by holy men in Africa and South America. My notion that the Druid Myrleduin could pass into the future by gazing into water placed in a bowl, is an extension of the Celtic belief that watery places were a gateway to the Otherworld.
