Books, Prehistory, Notices of Pencoyd Castle and Langstone by O Morgan and T Wakeman

This mound will carry us back to a very remote date, for there is little doubt that very many of the castles, strongholds, or important dwellings of the native chieftains of the country were in early times, long previous to the Norman conquest, erected on these mounds. It is also possible that they may have been raised for some purpose connected with the religion or the administration of the laws of the country; for the great mound of Silbury-hill in Wiltshire is of similar form and character. Their early use however, is a mystery, but the very frequent occurrence, throughout the kingdom, of these mounds, all of the same form, viz., that of a steep truncated cone, having a flat summit, surrounded by a foss, tends to confirm the belief that they were the residences or strongholds of the chieftains of the country, and some such tradition is attached to some of them. The steepness of the mound rendered them very difficult to assault, and easy to defend; and with the military appliances of those days, a stockade or timber structure on the summit was as secure as a stone wall. We have a very large and notable one in this county at Caerleon, which was subsequently taken into, and made to serve as the keep of the medieval castle. It is outside the square enclosure of the Roman wall, with which it appears to have had no connection. There is no trace of any early stone structure on the summit, all that is there being the work of very modern times, and chiefly done within record, or the memory of living persons. Had the mound existed in the Roman time, it would most probably have been enclosed within this wall, as it completely commands the town. It must also be remembered that the Romans were a stone building, and the Britons and also the Saxons a timber building people; and we have no remains of any stone castles or other structures (save a few Saxon Churches) which were erected between the Roman times and the Norman conquest, a period of more than 500 years. The absence of all masonry, as well as its position, seems to remove from it all probability of its being Roman, and to refer it to a later period. There is a similar mound in Cardiff Castle, which was raised within the area of the Roman enclosure; a large portion of the vallum at the angle where the buildings of the present Castle now stand, appears to have been removed for the purpose of forming this mound, its place being supplied at a later period, probably about the time of the Normans, by a prodigiously thick and strong wall. The summit of this mound was by the Normans surrounded with a lofty wall, within which were the dwelling apartments of the early castle, and this mound must have been raised for a very long time, to have become sufficiently consolidated to support such a structure. Many of these mounds exist in parts of Wales, where neither Romans, Saxons, nor Danes appear to have been located; they can, therefore, only have been the work of the British inhabitants, and from the circumstances attending those at Caerleon and Cardiff, I am disposed to consider them mostly as of post Roman date, and to have been raised when, after the departure of the Roman forces and the cessation of the Imperial authority, the native British inhabitants resumed the government of their own country, when they would naturally raise their own fortresses or castles after their own manner, and probably after the manner of their forefathers. The Britons do not seem to have taken to the stone-built towns and dwellings of the Romans, as none of their towns or villas shew any trace of having been lived in or used by later races; but on the contrary all, or nearly all, show marks of having been ruined or destroyed, and that very frequently by fire, during the time of their being occupied by persons using Roman implements, ornaments, and utensils, which are abundantly found in them; as though, when the Roman power had become weak and the troops withdrawn, the native population of the country had risen in insurrection against the Romans that remained, burnt and destroyed their towns and villas, and perhaps massacred their inhabitants, for the remains of every Roman town which is discovered shew indications of having been destroyed by fire, and the position in which the bodies of persons were found in Uriconium, shews moreover, that the destruction was the work of a hostile force. No Roman town, building, or villa seems to have been inhabited, occupied, or used for any purpose by any subsequent people, for they are found as ruins, with articles of Roman use still remaining in them; and the walls have all been razed and destroyed, whilst the pavements and hypocausts were in good condition, without any trace of subsequent habitation; and where medieval towns are met with on the sites of the ancient Roman, they appear to have been built above and out of the ruins of the Roman buildings, which, notwithstanding the solid and durable character of their masonry, never seem to have been used for any purpose except that of a store or quarry for materials; and a very long period seems to have intervened between the destruction of the Roman, and the building of the medieval town. I am, therefore, led to the belief, that these mounds were raised for their own purpose by the earth and timber building British inhabitants of the country, during that darkest period of our history, between the departure of the Romans, and the advent of the Saxons to these shores.

We have one of these mounds at Trelleck, one at Castleton, to which it seems to have given the name, one on the summit of the hill behind Ruperra. There are others in Glamorganshire. There is one in the Castle at Brecon, and a remarkable one on the hill above Builth, with earth works of early character round it, called the Castle, and on which no more recent medieval castle has been erected. There is also one near Towyn in Merionethshire, and when we know that they abound in Wales under the Welsh appellation Twyn, Englished by Tump, and that the keeps of the Castles of Arundel and Lewes in Sussex, Totness in Devonshire, the round Tower at Windsor, and all the Castles of Tonbridge, Canterbury, Guilford, Oxford, Warwick, Lincoln, Worcester before it was removed, York and Tickhill in Yorkshire, besides numerous others, all stand on mounds of this type, we may, I think, arrive at the conclusion that at some early period it was the practice of the inhabitants of this Island, or at least that part included in England and Wales, to construct their strongholds and fortresses in this manner. When the Normans became masters of the country, they found no castles, but they found these mounds ready to their hands; most of them were in the neighbourhood of some town, and these they fortified by building a circular strong wall round the flat summit, and fitting up dwelling places within it; and the fact of the earthworks being so consolidated as to afford a firm foundation for their massive walls, shews that they must have been thrown up a very long time before, in order to have become so hard and solid. In one instance at Guilford, a lofty square Norman keep tower was erected on the mound, as late as the middle of the XII Century, which will serve to shew that these mounds were not thrown up by the Normans on their first gaining possession of the country, for the purpose of supporting their earliest circular castles, but that they found them here, and used them as they wanted them.