Strata Florida Project

Photo Gallery 2

View of the Abbey leat system and Afon Glasffrwd in Dyffryn Tawel
(David Austin). 
To the west of the Abbey precinct are the earthworks of a sophisticated water management system consisting of ponds and leats (open water conduits). As here the width and depth of the channel created by building a downslope embankment suggests an enormous capacity sufficient not just for animal and human consumption but also for the provision of power over water-wheels. Just exactly how it tapped the waters of the Afon Glasffrwd seen beyond the leat, is uncertain although it would have involved also the waters of a significant holy well, known for its properties of healing eye complaints. 
(Copyright Strata Florida Research Project)

Soils survey of the Precinct and surrounding area (Dr Richard Hartnup and Dr Jemma Bezant). 
This mapping of the soils around the precinct of Strata Florida will provide an important basis for future research to understand the historic land use and environmental impact of the Abbey and other processes of occupation. The Abbey precinct itself stands out as relatively fertile Rheidol Brown Soils, probably reflecting its careful drainage and usage for intensive occupation and cultivation. 
(Copyright: Strata Florida Project)

The postulated Abbey Precinct projected onto a vertical air photograph taken in 1957 (David Austin). 
The white dots mark out the possible limits of the whole precinct at Strata Florida, while the red mark the division between Inner and Outer. This hypothesis is still being tested and it is likely that, over the next few years, we shall adjust and refine the outline as we undertake a series of trial excavations and more geophysics.
(Copyright: the Strata Florida Research Project)

The Geophysics of the Precinct as of June 2008 (Dr Jemma Bezant). 
Signs of major stone buildings, ditches, channels, industrial areas and other activity fill the fields we have surveyed so far. Much of this will be tested by trial excavation in future years. (Copyright: Strata Florida Research Project)

Trench Y Green 1 (2004): Iron-working area (David Austin). 
This view taken from the south shows the small trial trench dug in 2004 to test the nature of the soil anomalies revealed in Dr John Crowther’s work. Large deposits of iron-working slag were found in association with intensely burnt soils and filling a ditch running across the precinct area. The depth of the ditch is indicated by the ranging rod held by one of the excavators. 
(Copyright: Strata Florida research Project)

Trench Y Green 2 (2008): the Great Gatehouse (Quentin Drew).
 This is a view from the west of the excavation of a large building complex, currently interpreted as the Great Gatehouse of the Abbey. A clear plan is now emerging with large ground-floor chambers alongside a very wide cobbled carriageway which is heading directly towards the west door of the Abbey church, on which the whole Gatehouse is aligned. Towards the end of the Middle Ages the roadway was blocked and the whole structure perhaps converted into the residence recorded in a rental of 1546 when it was identified as the Porth Mawr (‘Great Gate’) of the Abbey. 
(Copyright: Strata Florida Research Project)

Trench Fynwent Fawr East 2 (2007): the Forge-mill (David Austin). 
Viewed from the south the excavations as they ended in the 2007 season have the remains of walls, traces of metal-working and a possible wheel pit. This would have lain within the precinct and within sight and sound of the monks at prayer. The church lies just beyond the Mynachlog Fawr farmhouse seen in the background. (Copyright: Strata Florida Research Project)

View of the road through the woods (David Austin). 
A major feature set among the earthworks in Coed Abaty is an old road. This photograph has been taken looking east with the precinct to the left (north). At this point the road was terraced into the slope on the right hand side and topped with an earthen bank. On the left-hand side the road is delineated by a masonry wall and this may be an early precinct boundary although it is cut by the canalisation of the Afon Glasffrwd which must have happened early in the creation of the Cistercian Abbey. (Copyright: Strata Florida Research Project)

Trench Bron y Berllan Mines 2: the adit (Daniel Jones). 
The wide man-made gulley across which the excavation trench has been laid out was the outflow channel of a drainage adit on the downslope side of one of the early mining pits. Created in the 19th century it appears it have been part of a short-lived re-opening of the old mines by the new mining company. They must have found quite quickly that the ore lodes, close to the surface, had been largely worked out and that they would need to move further west along the valley side to exploit the deeper deposits that earlier miners could not reach or drain with their limited technologies.  (Copyright: Strata Florida Research Project)

Funerary monument dedicated to Avarina and Elizabeth Stedman on the north wall of St. Mary’s parish church at Strata Florida (David Austin).
This poignant memorial records the early death of two Stedman girls in the early 18th century.  The family ownership of eh Strata Florida estate passed not long afterwards into the hands of the Powells of Nanteos in the Ystwyth Valley. 
(Copyright: Strata Florida Research Project)

Detail showing the Abbey ruins and the Stedman Plas taken from a Nanteos (Powell) estate map of 1765 in the National Library of Wales (NLW). 
This extract from the earliest map of he site shows the ruins of the Abbey and St Mary’s parish church to the north of the Stedman Plas. The extant house is depicted with its detached kitchen next door. In front of the house are a yard, a flower garden and a kitchen garden at the other side of which are a hay barn (still standing) and a gatehouse (swept away by the creation of the modern road in the mid 19th century. Postulated plan of the Abbey Precinct. This, at the moment (June 2008), is our best guess for the layout of the Abbey. It was clearly a (Copyright: the National Library of Wales)

Aerial photograph of Troed y Rhiw (Toby Driver).
This photograph, looking south-west with the Troed y Rhiw complex of earthworks in the upper centre of the picture. This clearly shows their location at the boundary of the upland (bottom right) and lowland (upper left) parts of the landscape. The buildings and related enclosures lie also on the edge of the demesne environs of the Abbey and appear to include both native tenements and a monastic bercaria, exploiting the extensive upland pastures for cattle and sheep. These earthworks and the documents relating to them are the subject of a study to be published shortly by Andrew Fleming and Louise Barker in the journal Medieval Archaeology.
(Crown copyright: Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments in Wales)

The Monk’s Trod. 
The Monk’s Trod linked Strata Florida to its sister Cistercian monasteries at Abbey Cwmhir and Strata Marcella. This view is taken near Teifi Pools as the road heads eastwards masked by a modern track. Soon after this its line heads out across open country. The research of Professor Andrew Fleming (UWL) has shown that this routeway is probably unique in Britain as a carefully engineered and constructed medieval road still visible in its original form.  Under threat today from off-road drivers, this unique monument should be given total protection by the exclusion of these destructive agents.

Aerial photograph of Llanllyr, Talsarn, Ceredigion, site of a former Cistercian nunnery (Toby Driver). 
The aerial photographic division of the RCAHMW under the leadership of Dr Toby Driver has been assisting the Strata Florida Project with a series of images discovering and showing key elements of the historic landscape. This photograph is of the historic house at Llanllyr, rebuilt inth 19th century, but an earlier house was built out of the remains of the former Cistercian nunnery whose lands were appropriated by the Abbot and Chapter of Strata Florida soon after its foundation in the late 12th century. It is likely to have been formed out of an earlier pre-Norman monastic cell, the grant for which is recorded as an inscription on a stone still standing upright in the grounds of the house.  Ponds to the rear may be monastic in origin.
(Crown copyright: Royal Commission on Ancient and Historic Monuments in Wales)

View of Mynachlog Fawr house from the south from a cherrypicker, June 2008 (David Austin). 
The former Plas of the Stedmans is on the right-hand side of this photograph taken from a cherrypicker. The house, a grade II* listed building, will provide the focus of the new arrangements on the site and will be carefully restored to both preserve its historic ambience and provide the proper facilities for sustainable use long into the future. The small ruined building (grade II) to one side of the house was once its detached kitchen and has a very large stone-built oven in the interior. On the left can be seen the east side of the farm buildings set around a central courtyard. Between the two is a road which leads from Pontrhydfendigaid to the Welsh Assembly woodland (the north end of the North Tywi Forest block) in the central Cambrian Mountains. This piece of the road which now divides the house from its farm buildings was created in the mid 19th century when it damaged the garden and yard arrangements of the Plas as shown on the 1765 map. The development will seek to move this road to the west so that the building complex will within a pedestrian area. This will also enable footpath linkage through to the Cadw Abbey ruins which can be seen on this photograph just beyond the house. The keen eyed will be able also to pick out the remains of walls showing through the roadside verges (four of them marked by red-and-white ranging rods). These are parts of the former Abbey buildings  on the south side of the cloister (the lay brothers’ dormitory and the refectory in all likelihood).
(Copyright: SFRP).

View of Mynachlog Fawr farm buildings from the east from a cherrypicker, June 2008 (David Austin). 
This complex of buildings from the mid 19th century originally consisted of four stone buildings which served a fairly large tenant farm practising mixed agriculture for local consumption and markets.  The farm today is largely monoculture sheep with some cattle and a few horses, and so the buildings are no longer fit for purpose. For this reason much of the activity is now from the steel-framed buildings on the left which incorporate the remains of the fourth stone building, once the beudy fach (small cattle house) for calves. The building in the foreground (grade II) was the beudy fawr for milking and a dairy with pig-pens at the back. To the right is the stafell (stable) with storage rooms on the first floor and a double-arched wagon-house at the far end. The near end also incorporated a small house for farm labourers. The two beudiau and the stafell were built in the mid 19th century when the new road was built. The only building from the former plas arrangements to survive this major reorganisation was the sgubor (barn) built for threshing and storage.  This magnificent structure (grade II) incorporates many dressed stones (especially the ventilation loops at the south end) taken from the Abbey ruins and is probably contemporary with the main house. It is certainly shown on the 1765 map. The intention again is carefully to restore the historic buildings and provide the proper facilities for sustainable long-term use.
(Copyright: SFRP).

The Yew of Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Sculptural Installation of Iwan Bala in St Mary’s churchyard, Strata Florida (David Austin). 
Perhaps the most famous connection that Strata Florida has had with the arts is that of Dafydd ap Gwilym, the most illustrious of the medieval Welsh poets and father of cywydd, a later medieval form of lyric poetry, whose verses are a celebration of life and his native Ceredigion and Wales. According to a cywydd by a near-contemporary, Gruffudd Gryg, Dafydd was buried next to a yew at the boundary wall of the cemetery at Strata Florida. By tradition, perhaps much later, the yew in this photograph was identified as the burial place and is now much visited by those familiar with his beautiful work. It is marked by two simple inscriptions, one simply black paint on an architectural ashlar block made of Dundry stone and the other carved on slate placed there by the Honourable Society of the Cymmrodorion. Both inscriptions simply record his name and his approximate dates, 1320-1380. 

Iwan Bala’s piece, created in June/July 2006, for an archaeologist like myself (David Austin), raises critical issues of the meaning of place and its marking within the fabric of Welsh culture. As I (DA) struggle to understand the place and its setting I am acutely aware that knowledge also sits within the memory, both individual and collective, and that this is largely expressed orally in the Welsh language. My own relationship to that identity is problematic, but something of which I must be constantly aware. The value of the artist in these circumstances is both to draw those meanings to the surface and give them material presence as tangible images in a highly significant context. The challenges raised, of representation and oral memory, are also of wider intellectual importance than those related to Wales. For all these reasons the presence of creative artists at Strata Florida is essential. (Copyright: SFRP).

Strata Florida monk's head (David Austin). 
Among the artefacts recorded in the house at Mynachlog Fawr is this carved stone head of a tonsured cleric, probably a monk. It is executed in a very dense brilliantly white limestone, probably from northern France or Burgundy, and may depict one of the founding fathers of the Cistercian order, Robert of Molesme, Stephen Harding or, most likely, St. Bernard, the great proponent of the Cistercians in the twelfth century, whose monastery at Clairvaux was the mother for the Whitland family of houses to which Strata Florida belonged. The head was found in Stephen William’s excavations in the late 1880’s and is illustrated in his report by Worthington G. Smith (facing page 216).
(Copyright: SFRP).

Iwan Bala’s explanatory text for his installation (Photograph: David Austin). 
This is the text provided on site by Iwan Bala himself in July 2006. It speaks for itself. Iwan Bala is an artist of international reputation with a strong grounding in the culture of Wales (www.iwanbala.com).

 

View of Kells Priory from the south-west (David Austin). 
The Augustinian Priory at Kells lies in the bottom of the valley near the modern village on the King’s River. It is a monument noted for its fortifications which were added to the monastery in the 15th century during a long period of political uncertainty. Although linked together by a curtain wall the fortifications consist of a series of individual tower houses occupied, it would appear, by different secular families in the area. The site is in the care of the Irish Government’s Office of Public Works.

Opening ceremony of the sculpture show in the Abbey ruins at Strata Florida on June 19th, 2005 (David Austin). 
The show, organised by the two communities of Pontrhydfendigaid and Kells was an important event and there was a large turn-out at Strata Florida at the first of the formal openings.

Opening ceremony of the sculpture show in the Priory ruins at Kells, Co. Kilkenny, on August 13th, 2006 (David Austin).

Umha Aois (Age of Bronze) firing at night (David Austin). 
One of the important elements of the 2006 show was a group of Irish sculptors, called Umha Aois, whose work was centred on the reconstruction of ancient techniques for the firing and making of bronze objects (www.umha-aois.com). Their prototypes are Bronze Age artefacts, such as axes and palstaves, although they also make pieces of modern design. The whole is conceived as a public performance and he night-time events, as here, were particularly spectacular.

Artefacts in the Master Bedroom of Mynachlog Fawr House, part of the collection “Shooting the Past” by Moyrah Gall (Photograph: the artist). 
Moyrah Gall (http://www.photography-landscape.com/) was one of the first artists to become associated with the Strata Florida Project.  Although interested in many aspects of the work, she was particularly attracted by the house and the myriads of artefacts which filled it. Her images, some of which formed the subject of a show called ‘Shooting the Past’, have, on the one hand, a direct relationship with the juxtaposition and incongruity of artefacts in the domestic setting as abstractions, but, on the other, have a relationship with the archaeological and historical process of record and narrative. Thus the presentation in the show, not only of the photographs, but also accompanying written texts, cast in the mode of factual documentation. These are largely fictional and have an edge of irony not lost on the archaeologists themselves.

Strata Florida Wood, part of the collection “Wildwood” by Pete Davis (Photograph: the artist). 
Pete Davis (http://www.pete-davis-photography.com/ ) is a long-time friend of the Project Director and in discussion it emerged that he was creating aeries of images called ‘Wildwood’, using a number of woodland locations in Europe and the USA.  It was but a short step (a visit to Coed Abaty) for Pete to begin using the ancient demesne wood of the Abbey as another source of inspiration. Pete worked mostly on his own with his (very heavy) large-format camera. The exhibition prints of the results are stunning, with enormous clarity and sharpness of detail given by the size of the negatives. The images reflect not simply the woodland processes of growth and decay, but also the time-depth in the relationship with the archaeological textures of the woodland floor, so much a focus of the Project’s work. The stillness and intensity of the gaze is perfect metaphor and lesson in the need for detailed observation and reflection needed in the archaeological work.

Formal Education: Undergraduate teaching. 
Excavations at the Gatehouse in 2007: a ‘trowelling line’ under the supervision (at the side of the trench) of Quentin Drew, the director of the excavation. The provision of real experience of a ‘live’ research dig is an important component of the archaeology degree at Lampeter. It is hard work, but very enjoyable and satisfying.  It also helps to bring the different year groups together.

Formal Education: Teaching.  
This group of schoolchildren from a local primary school is watching the Lampeter blacksmith, Alec Page, and a member of the Umha Aois sculpture group make iron objects at this temporary forge, with bronze working happening n the background. This is a powerful way of introducing history to the young.

Interpretation: Storytelling.  
Hearing about the excavation and what we have found is an important element of our work. This particular session with a local primary school was particularly lively, with the Director being asked a whole range of questions, some of which he found very hard to answer.

Interpretation: Handling the Past. 
People love the opportunity to handle historic artefacts, especially when they have been newly discovered. The immediacy of it all is immensely attractive and on one of our open days we had a constant stream of visitors to our finds-shed.

Interpretation: Event. 
We have, from the start, sought to engage the local community, and at this open day in 2007, we drew nearly 300 visitors on one day alone. Lynn Morgan, a Lampeter postgraduate and a Welsh speaker, met and talked to eh visitors. It is also a good chance to proclaim our institution’s role in all of this.

Interpretation: Performance. 
The creation of bronze objects by Umha Aois had infinite fascination for this group from a local history society. Their interest was captured by the skill and exotic nature of what they were seeing, by the furnace fires and sense of creation, and by the direct connection with the past.

Interpretation: New viewpoints. 
Modern methods of interpretation are more interactive and bold. The Strata Florida project seeks to work with other institutions, agencies and regional tourism operators to reveal the many narratives and images that are associated with Strata Florida and its landscapes.

Postulated Plan of the Abbey Precinct.
This, at the moment (June 2008), is our best guess for the layout of the Abbey. It was clearly a busy place even on this evidence and probably the largest Cistercian precinct in the British Isles.