Qualla: Castell Nadolig

Castell Nadolig: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Internal Fire Museum of Power, CC BY-SA 4.0. The name means Christmas Castle, and nobody is sure why. The hillfort sits on a low summit a short walk from the village of Penbryn in southern Ceredigion, ramparts now blurred into hedgebanks but still tracing a double ring around a green plateau. Sometime in the late Iron Age, perhaps between the first century BC and the first century AD, a small bronze spoon with a hole drilled through one corner was placed here, along with its companion spoon, marked with an incised cross. A farmer found them in 1829 beneath a heap of stones inside the fort. A clergyman donated them to Oxford in 1836. They have been at the Ashmolean Museum ever since, and what they were for is a mystery that two centuries of archaeology has still not solved.

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Image: Internal Fire Museum of Power | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castell Nadolig: A Christmas Castle on the Ridge

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. Castell Nadolig means Christmas Castle in Welsh; nadolig is the modern Welsh word for Christmas, derived from the Latin natalicia, festival of birth. Whether the fort was so named because of a midwinter event recorded only in memory, or because of a misheard older name, or for so...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castell Nadolig: The Spoons

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1829, the tenant farmer working the land found two objects of cast bronze beneath a pile of stones inside the inner enclosure. Each spoon is small, with a short flat handle decorated in the curving styles archaeologists call La Tene, a Celtic art language that travelled from c...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castell Nadolig: What Were They For?

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. Nobody knows for certain. The leading interpretation among Iron Age specialists is that the spoons were used for divination: a liquid, perhaps blood, perhaps water, perhaps a herbal infusion, was poured from the spoon with the hole onto the spoon with the cross, and the pattern o...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 4.0

Castell Nadolig: The View from the Bank

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wici Rhuthun 1, CC BY-SA 3.0. Standing on the outer bank in late afternoon, you can see the line of the coast. Aberporth lies a couple of miles to the west, the cliffs above Penbryn drop away to the long curve of sand and sea, and to the south the land rolls back toward the Preseli Hills. The Iron Age people ...

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Image: Wici Rhuthun 1 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Castell Nadolig: A Scheduled Monument

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ethan Doyle White, CC BY-SA 4.0. Castell Nadolig is a scheduled monument, protected by Cadw, the Welsh historic environment service. It is on private agricultural land but the outline can be seen from a footpath, and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales has published surveys desc...

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Image: Ethan Doyle White | CC BY-SA 4.0