Qualla: Presaddfed Burial Chamber

Presaddfed Burial Chamber: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Humphrey Bolton, CC BY-SA 2.0. Reach the southern tomb through a kissing gate and across two hundred metres of grass, and the first thing you notice is how low the structure sits. The capstone, roughly four metres across, rests on three stout uprights at one end and a single slender pillar at the other, as if the builders were daring gravity to call their bluff. It has not. Five thousand years on, the slab still hangs there above the soil, balanced on stones that the people who placed them did not write down their names for.

Image: Humphrey Bolton | CC BY-SA 2.0

Presaddfed Burial Chamber: Two Tombs, One Question

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beep boop beep, CC BY-SA 4.0. There are actually two chamber tombs at Presaddfed, only a few metres apart on a low rise about a kilometre northwest of Bodedern, just south of Llyn Llywenan. The southern one is the more complete; the northern one has already lost its argument with gravity, with two uprights st...

Image: Beep boop beep | CC BY-SA 4.0

Presaddfed Burial Chamber: The Long Recording

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ian Greig, CC BY-SA 2.0. Welsh antiquarians were drawn to these stones early. Richard Gough included Presaddfed in his 1798 update of William Camden's Britannia, and a steady stream of nineteenth-century articles in Archaeologia Cambrensis worked over the site. By 1900, J.E. Griffiths had collected it in...

Image: Ian Greig | CC BY-SA 2.0

Presaddfed Burial Chamber: What the Builders Knew

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Chris Andrews, CC BY-SA 2.0. Neolithic Anglesey was a busy place. The island sits on the western sea routes that connected Atlantic Europe — Brittany, Ireland, the Isle of Man, the Hebrides — and the chambered tombs strung along the Welsh coast are part of a tradition that runs from Spain to Orkney. Whoever ...

Image: Chris Andrews | CC BY-SA 2.0

Presaddfed Burial Chamber: Still Standing, Just

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Beep boop beep, CC BY-SA 4.0. The southern chamber needs a little help these days. A wooden frame braces one of the north uprights — a small modern intervention to keep a five-thousand-year-old balancing act balanced. Cadw maintains the site, the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wal...

Image: Beep boop beep | CC BY-SA 4.0