Early Settlers in the Area
Old Stone Age
The first people came to Pembrokeshire during what is known as the “Old Stone Age” www.envf.port.ac.uk/geo/research/carningli/archaeology.htm. At that time the landscape was very different from today: St Bride's Bay did not exist, and the Ramsey and Skomer islands were merely headlands along the coastal. Settlers came in pursuit of their prey as it followed the retreating ice sheets. They found shelter in caves along the coast from Tenby to Monkton, lighting fires in the caves’ entrance as a protection against the weather and wild beasts. They left animal bones and flint tools as evidence of their early presence.
When the weather grew less severe, some ten thousand years ago, there came a new group of settlers that had developed a technique in making small flint implements that could be used, for example, as arrowheads or harpoon-barbs. They belonged to the “Middle Stone Age” and while some of them continued to live in caves, like Nanna's Cave on Caldey Island, others settled on coastal sites, within reach of the sea for fishing and for raw material in the shape of flint pebbles. Among the discarded tools and debris of a community living on Nab Head there was a new implement in the form of an elongated pebble that was used for knocking limpets off the rocks.
New Stone Age
The sea continued to rise, as the ice sheets melted, to give shape to the present coastline. Somewhere around 3000 BC “Neolithic” or “New Stone Age” farmers arrived. They came by sea, hugging the coasts in their frail curragh-type craft. Only one of their settlements has been found in Pembrokeshire, with traces of a small round structure and a rectangular building beneath the fortifications of a later hill-fort at Clegyr Boia, west of St. David's. These people are remembered, however, by the most remarkable great stone, or megalithic, monuments in the form of communal tombs or burial chambers. The chamber, or cromlech, was constructed by placing a massive capstone on upright stone pillars and covering the whole with stones or earth in the shape of a round, or long mound. In most cases the mound has been removed leaving the stones. Pentre Ifan, near Newport, is one of the most spectacular chamber tombs in the country, with its curved facade and portal reminiscent of the portal dolmens of Ireland. Forests had to be cleared to make cultivation possible and tree felling was effectively carried out with sharp edged, polished stone axes, some of them made of spotted dolerite from outcrops at the eastern end of the Presely Hills, where there appears to have been an axe-factory producing axes of such quality that they were in demand as far afield as Antrim and Salisbury Plain.
Bronze Age
The same spotted dolerite was used to make battle axes by men of the early “Bronze Age” who came bearing metal that was yet too scarce or precious to use in making heavy implements. These were the Beaker Folk, so called from the shapely drinking vessels which they buried as grave goods with their dead under pudding shaped mounds, or barrows. The preponderance of barrows along the upland route on the Presely Hills, and the Ridgeway in the south, indicates that not all those who travelled these routes from Wessex to Ireland to bring back gold from Wicklow Hills were able to complete the journey. Gors Fawr the only stone circle in Pembrokeshire, its sixteen boulders forming an egg-shaped ring, standing on a purple moor within sight of the source of the famous bluestones. It is these Presely bluestones that are to be found at Stonehenge. Most common of the megalithic monuments in Pembrokeshire are the standing stones. They appear to have formed part of complex Bronze Age ritual practices that are not yet understood. They are sometimes to be seen in pairs, as at Cerrig Meibion Arthur, and at Parc-y-meirw there is a rare alignment of eight stones, now mostly concealed in hedgebanks.
Iron Age
Bronze gave way to iron with the arrival of groups of warlike Celts in about 500 BC. Their fortified settlements are scattered all over Pembrokeshire www.castellhenllys.com/. Tall promontories that thrust out into the sea have defensive banks built across the neck to protect them from landward. The promontory fort on St. David's Head has the formidable Warriors' Dyke for its defense. The Deer Park is the largest promontory fort in Wales. Inland there are many hill-top settlements enclosed by ramparts and among them three great hill-forts: Moel Drygarn, Carn Ingli and Garn Fawr, each with the visible remains of hut platforms and enclosures that provided refuge for women, children and stock in the event of enemy attack. Traces of “Iron Age” fields are to be seen on the slopes above Porth Melgan and on Skomer Island, which has one of the best preserved ancient field systems in Wales. The Celts brought with them a new culture and a language that survives, in one of its derivative forms, as the Welsh language. The Roman legions kept clear of Pembrokeshire. They came as far as Carmarthen, which became a defended Roman settlement.
Irish Settlerment
Late in the fourth century an Irish tribe, the Deisi, from Co. Meath in Ireland, migrated to Pembrokeshire under their leader, Eochaid Allmuir, and established a royal dynasty that was to rule in south-west Wales for some five centuries. They provided the first written records in the form of inscribed stones bearing the names of those who were considered worthy of commemoration. The writing was in Latin or in ogham, an Irish alphabet designed for ease of cutting on the edge of a stone pillar. Many of these stones have been rescued and placed in churches or churchyards for safe keeping, as at Brawdy, Mathry, Maenclochog and Cilgerran. A stone in St Dogmael's church, used in decoding the ogham alphabet, has in Latin Sagarani fili Cunotami with the ogham Sagrani maqi Cunatami, commemorating one Sagranus son of Cunotamus www.geograph.org.uk/photo/661315. The Goidelic maqi, from which `mac' derives, would have been map or ap if Sagranus had been a Welshman.
The inscriptions date from fifth century onward, by which time Christianity had been long established here. Pembrokeshire lay on the route of the Celtic saints, as the early missionaries were known, who travelled between Ireland and Rome or Jerusalem. It also had its own saint, David, born at St. David's to St Non, who is remembered by a chapel and a well above St Non's Bay. David was so revered that his shrine became a place of pilgrimage to the extent that two visits to St. David's cathedral equaled one to Rome.
