Banc Du (Powys)

Date Added: 14th Apr 2025
Site Type: Stone Circle Country: Wales (Powys)
Visited: Yes on 14th Apr 2025. My rating: Condition 2 Ambience 4 Access 1

Log Text: On access, I walked from David's Well to the SE along a "bridleway". There's a 4x4 track that ends at a (broken) gate after a few 100 metres. A few 100 meters further on from the gate and the bridleway pretty much disappeared. Picked up and lost a couple of quad tracks whilst maintaining a route that was a bridleway on the map - there's plenty of landmarks so navigation is easy. At every fence the gates no longer existed. I voted 2 fences which I later discovered were both rotted away further along. The general going was tough.
This route seemed by far the shorter and most direct, judging from the map. If it is then the other routes must be extremely challenging.
The site itself is interesting, actually very interesting.
My OS 1:50,000 map shows an ancient cairn and a 4 stone circle on the col at the site here called Banc Du. The cairn appears to be a heavily damaged and robbed out bronze age burial cairn, very possibly a curbed cairn. There appears to be multiple burials within it. The seems to be at least 3 demolished costs, possibly 4 or 5. It appears that the stones of the cairn continue at least 0.5m down below the grass level.
The 4 stone circle is curious. The 4 stones are nit in a square. I've visited several 4 stone circles, mainly in Scotland that are square, this is not. 3 stones seem to be on an arc. These 3 stones are approx 40 - 50 cm diameter and well buried. The 4th stone sits a little off the arc, enough so that if one extends the arc of the 3, the 4th would sit well within the circle formed but definitely in one half of it.
The 4th stone is big, approx a 1m cube, and sits on top of a big pile of cairn type stones that look as though they could be covering of a collapsed cist. If this is a stone circle, I would suggest it encircled a burial cist on which had been pushed a large boulder. Or possibly that the whole structure was another curbed burial cairn. This structure is only about 15m from the other cairn.
Approximately 50m to the south, a little east of the true col, there are 2 more cairns. One is quite obvious, the second - a little further east - is almost entirely grown over with vegetation, but is still, on examination, recognisable as a mound the same size and shape as the more obvious cairn adjacent to it. Both are the size and shape of an upturned rowing boat.
When leaving the site I noticed another small cairn, again heavily vegetated, in amongst a few trees. This cairn was perhaps (not entirely sure) 150 - 200 m from the Banc Du site.
So, it seems to me that this isn't a stone circle and a cairn, but a small bronze age cemetery consisting of 2 large multi-burial cairns and at least 3 other single burial sized cairns.