Qualla: Caer Leb

Caer Leb: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Keatinge (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Pull off the A4080 west of Brynsiencyn, park in a layby that holds maybe five cars, and walk through a gate into a wet field. What looks at first like an irregularity in the grass turns out to be a five-sided earthwork, with two parallel banks separated by a boggy ditch and a single original entrance on the east side. This is Caer Leb. The name means 'Leaven Castle' in Welsh - leaven as in the rising agent in bread, possibly a reference to the way the earth banks swell out of the flat ground around them. It has been a working farmstead for more than two thousand years.

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Image: Richard Keatinge (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Caer Leb: Older Than the Romans

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Porius1, CC BY-SA 3.0. The original date of Caer Leb is uncertain because nobody has dug a deep enough trench to settle it. Based on excavations of similar enclosures elsewhere on Anglesey, the consensus is that it was raised around the 2nd century BC - solidly in the Iron Age, more than a hundred year...

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Image: Porius1 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Caer Leb: The 1865 Dig

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Velatrix, CC0. The first proper excavation came in 1865, when antiquaries found rectangular buildings inside the enclosure on the eastern side and a circular structure on the south. None of these survive above ground today; the foundations are buried or were cleared by later ploughing. The digg...

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Image: Velatrix | CC0

Caer Leb: The Walk to the Stones

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Keatinge (talk), CC BY-SA 3.0. Caer Leb sits at one end of a quiet stretch of walking country that strings together several of Anglesey's most important prehistoric sites. A footpath leads south-west from the earthwork along a low ridge above the Afon Braint, passing the cleared site of the lost Tre'r Dryw Bac...

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Image: Richard Keatinge (talk) | CC BY-SA 3.0

Caer Leb: What the Field Loses

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Nicholls, CC BY-SA 2.0. Five hundred metres north-west along the road, near a small bridge called Pont Sarn Las - the Green Causeway Bridge - the foundations of three round houses occasionally appear after a dry summer, when the grass burns off the slightly raised stone footings. A much larger settlemen...

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Image: Bill Nicholls | CC BY-SA 2.0