Welsh Journals

REVIEWS HISTORY OF MERIONETH, VOL. I: FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TO THE AGE OF THE NATIVE PRINCES. By E. G. Bowen and C. A. Gresham. Dolgellau, The Merioneth Historical and Record Society, 1967. Pp. xv, 298; 110 line figures, 12 tone plates. 63s. This is a good and important volume. Professor Bowen has contributed chapter I (a short geological introduction) and chapter IV (a brief dis- cussion of the Dark Ages); Mr. Gresham's is the great bulk of the work, comprising chapters II and III (Neolithic, Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman) and the index. Each class of object and site is introduced by a brief discussion, but the body of the work is a copiously illustrated corpus of lists, references, descriptions and particularly plans of sites and high- quality drawings of objects. That Merioneth was wretchedly served in these things before this, a glance at the Merioneth Inventory volume published by the old, unreformed R.C.A.M. (Wales and Monmouth) in 1921 will show. The Merioneth Historical and Record Society and Mr. Gresham are to be congratulated on producing a basic tool of scholar- ship that must be indispensable to anyone seriously interested in piecing together the history of Roman and pre-Roman Wales. This basic material is stone, pottery, bronzes, inscribed stones and, above all, field monuments of stone and earth: chambered tombs, stone circles, cairns, hill-forts, groups of huts, Roman forts and roads. An enormous amount of material has been gathered together here and illustrated by the labours of Mr. Gresham and the late Mr. W. J. Hemp which was either unknown or merely a name or scattered obscurely through many periodicals. The History has also definitely improved on the Royal Commission by publishing like with like, not mixing all periods together well-nigh inextricably under civil parishes, as has been the recent practice of the Commissioners. Inevitably, there are minor criticisms. The draughtsmanship of the plans is very variable in quality: fig. 68 is an example which the messy convention used to represent scattered stones, and the uneven control of line thickness, make difficult to interpret; what is happening on the western side of this entrance? The style and placing of the lettering is often unsuccessful. Printing nine maps of the distributions of various objects and monuments with a relief map as background is an excellent idea, but poor draughtsmanship has made the relief map disastrously cluttered. We could have done with scales on plates VI, VII and XII, and rather more helpful a background for the Dyffryn Ardudwy quern (pi. XII). Mr. Gresham makes out a convincing case for the sequence of his periods 1 and 2 at Caer Drewyn, but perhaps a less convincing one for the