Description
St. Lythan’s Burial Chamber Photos: ‘St. Lythan’s Burial Chamber’, Adam Stanford, 2011.
Also available as part of the Prehistoric Britain Greetings Cards Collection No. 1.
St. Lythan’s burial chamber displays a striking stone chamber built from three massive uprights forming a box-like structure, open to the east, supporting an enormous capstone (4.5m by 3m by 0.8m thick) and estimated to weigh in excess of 30 tonnes. The underside of the capstone stands about 1.8m above the present floor of the chamber. Known also as Gwalyfiliast, the name translates as the ‘kennel of the greyhound bitch’, and indeed the chamber does look rather like a giant dog-kennel. The chamber lies at the east end of the long mound some 25m by 10m, much of it heavily robbed. J.W. Lukis records finding pottery and human remains in earth thrown out of the chamber sometime before 1875, but there has never been a scientific investigation of the site.
Digital Digging – text by Professor Tim Darvill.
The St Lythans burial chamber (Welsh: Siambr Gladdu Llwyneliddon) is a single stone megalithic dolmen, built around 4,000 BC as part of a chambered long barrow, during the mid Neolithic period, in what is now known as the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales. It lies about half a mile (1 km) to the west of the hamlet of St Lythans, near Dyffryn Gardens. It also lies around one mile (1.6 km) south of Tinkinswood burial chamber, a more extensive cromlech that it may once have resembled, constructed during the same period. The site is on pasture land, but pedestrian access is allowed and is free, with roadside parking available for 2–3 cars about 50 yards (50 metres) from the site. The dolmen, which has never been fully excavated, is maintained by Cadw, the Welsh Historic Environment Agency.
