Pentre Ifan

Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Ancient Monuments picnic at Pentre Ifan

Our Vice President Sian Rees supplied this eyewitness account of the very special event that took place at Pentre Ifan on 20 June 2009, 125 years to the day after the Pentre Ifan chamber tomb became Wales’s oldest guardianship monument.

‘Documents are silent as to the weather conditions prevailing at Pentre Ifan burial chamber when General Pitt Rivers visited on 8 June 1884 to write his recommendation for the preservation of the monument. But it was a typical Pembrokeshire day, with light cloud, slanting rays of watery sun and occasional showers of soft rain when, some 125 years later, several of his successor Inspectors of Ancient Monuments held a picnic at the site to celebrate the commencement of state care for the ancient monuments of Wales.

‘Lubbock’s Ancient Monuments Act was passed, after considerable opposition and delay, in 1882, whereupon the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Augustus Pitt Rivers, was appointed to visit monuments put forward by their owners as candidates for state care. Lord Kensington had already proffered the well known cromlech of Pentre Ifan and Pitt Rivers’ report and sketches were dispatched with admirable celerity four days after his visit, resulting in the deed of guardianship being signed in a further eight days — the first in Wales and one of the first in the UK. Thus 20 June is regarded as the date when state care for ancient monuments and the work of the Inspectorate in Wales was born.

‘Such a date could not, the convivial Cadw Inspectorate considered, be allowed to pass without celebration. Accordingly members of the Inspectorate in Wales, past and present, were invited to participate in a luncheon consumed on the cairn, with, thereafter, speeches and song delivered under the capstone of a monument that has seen many such festivities. A resumé of state interventions at the site was given, from the initial boundary marker stones and notice board positioned in 1884, the forbidding iron railings in 1905, the infamous wooden supports in 1936, and Grimes’s excavations and acquisition of further land permitting the presentation of the whole cairn.

‘The Inspectorate Song was then solemnly sung, a dynamic anthem which charts the phases of Inspectorate work through the ages. Sung to the tune of The Vicar of Bray, it declares the intention of the Inspectorate to survive to continue the work of state protection of ancient monuments whatever the prevailing regulatory regime. It begins:

In Queen Victoria’s lengthy reign   
The gentry held preferment                             
But Lubbock passed his AM Act                   
And would not brook deferment.                  
Augustus ‘gainst these nobles strove
Prehistr’y to preserve, Sir
Our first great P-R man, who doth
Our grateful thanks deserve, Sir

(Chorus) For this is law that we’ll maintain
Come tempest, storm or gales, Sir
That whatso’er regime holds sway
We’ll still serve the monuments of Wales, Sir

etc

As past General Secretary Dai Morgan Evans opened a bottle of champagne under the watchful eye of our Society’s President, the health of the Inspectorate was drunk. The company then departed to inspect the excavations at Nevern Castle, being conducted by Fellow Chris Caple.