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Carn Fawr Round Cairns is a prehistoric round cairn situated in Wales and protected by Cadw as a scheduled ancient monument under reference CD246. The monument rises from bedrock composed of Ashgill mudstone, siltstone and sandstone, geology that has shaped the landscape for over 400 million years since the Ordovician period. This stone-built structure represents funerary or ceremonial practice during the Bronze Age, when such cairns were constructed as burial monuments or ritual focal points across the Welsh uplands.
The cairn's form reflects the practical constraints and resources of its Bronze Age builders, who worked with locally available stone to create a substantial mound. The underlying Ashgill bedrock, exposed across much of the surrounding terrain, would have provided both the raw material for construction and the visible geological character of the hilltop environment. Round cairns of this type were commonly built during the second millennium BC, serving communities who inhabited the upland regions of Wales.
Today the monument survives as a tangible link to prehistoric settlement patterns and burial practices in Wales. Its protected status reflects its importance as an archaeological record of Bronze Age society and land use. The survival of such cairns depends on their robust stone construction, which has enabled them to withstand millennia of weathering on the exposed Welsh hillsides.
Carn Fawr Round Cairns is a scheduled monument protected by Cadw under reference CD246. View the official record →
Carn Fawr Round Cairns is a prehistoric round cairn situated in Wales and protected by Cadw as a scheduled ancient monument under reference CD246.
Carn Fawr Round Cairns dates from the prehistoric period, and is classified as a round cairn. It is one of over 32,000 scheduled monuments protected across the UK.
Carn Fawr Round Cairns is a Scheduled Ancient Monument, legally protected by Cadw — the body responsible for designating and safeguarding heritage sites in Wales. The official designation reference is CD246.
Several scheduled monuments lie within 10 km, including Nant yr Eira Prehistoric Copper Mines & 19th Century Lead Mine (3.4 km), Cairn on Pen Lluest-y-Carn (4.3 km), North Cairn on Pen Plynlimon-Fawr (4.5 km).
This page is just one thread. A full Aubrey report pulls together 13 strands of Carn Fawr Round Cairns's history, each drawn from the record and mapped to the exact spot:
Every location is different. Not every section appears for every place, only what the historical record actually holds turns up in a report.
Carn Fawr Round Cairns stands on Ashgill Rocks (Undifferentiated), bedrock that formed in the Ashgill. The rock here is mudstone, siltstone and sandstone.