86 THE WILTSHIRE ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND NATURAL HISTORY MAGAZINE 
A series of letters from 1800-1801 reveals some 
tantalising glimpses of further interest in the 
subject. In January 1800 Iolo tells Owen Jones that 
he intends to: 
come by way of Stone henge, not above 5 or 6 miles 
out of my way, to London; I want to notice the stone, 
I have often seen the place but not since I became a 
little acquainted Scientifically with the modern 
System of Mineralogy, which is necessary for a new 
acct. of Stone Henge. As for the places whence the 
stones were dug I have beyond the possibility of a 
doubt long ago discovered them (British Library 
Additional MSS 15024, f. 308-09). 
This confidence is echoed in a letter to William 
Owen Pughe some months letter: ‘I will come by 
stone henge, not much out of my way, and take a 
proper account of it. I have lost what I once wrote 
on it, or have mislaid it, I am certain that I can give 
a better account of it than has yet appeared’ (NLW 
MS 13221E, 77). But that ‘proper account’, like so 
many other schemes of Iolo’s, either has not 
survived or was never written. In 1801, William 
Owen Pughe, busily mapping the place-names of 
early Welsh poetry onto a druidic landscape, asked 
Iolo: 
If, in your way up, you should come the Marlborough 
Road, try to stop to examine Avebury more minutely 
than I had time to do — I think, that there is no doubt 
of its being our grand national place of Meeting — It 
was (I say) the Gorsez Bryn Gwyzon — Bryn Gwyzon 
(Silbury hill) formed its meridional Index; for I 
think, you will find it to be exactly south from the 
centre of Avebury, or from some particular point in 
the circle — Cludair Cyvrangon, or the Mound of the 
Conventions was only another name for Bryn 
Gwyzon? (NLW MS 21282E, item 350). 
Iolo in response promises ‘to bestow one whole day 
on Avebury and Silbury’, adding: 
I have long wished to do so, and I now want to do so, 
and, were it possible, another day to examine Stone 
henge more minutely than I have hitherto done, of 
each of these curious objects I have never yet been 
able to do any thing more than to glance at them, or 
to take but very transient views of them, tho’ I have 
several times passed by each of them. You think 
Avebury to be Gorsedd Bryn Gwyddon: I should not 
be very loath to swear it when I consider every 
circumstance (NLW MS 13221E, 116). 
Those ‘transient views’ rather undermine 
earlier claims to have ‘studied’ the places at length, 
and it is hard not to feel that Iolo never got round to 
giving the sites his full attention. This may partly 
be the effect of an increasing preoccupation with his 
native Glamorgan, neatly exemplified by the 
location of ‘Bryn Gwyddor’ (or, in William Owen 
Pughe’s idiosyncratic orthography, ‘Gwyzon’). This 
‘hill of knowledge’ is referred to in a (probably 
spurious) Welsh triad (a medieval three-line verse- 
form that Iolo excelled at imitating) as the site of a 
bardic meeting or gorsedd, and though Iolo seems 
here to accept William Owen Pughe’s identification 
with Silbury in 1801, he would ultimately locate 
Bryn Gwyddon at Ystradowen, near Cowbridge, 
where he spent much of his life (Williams 1956, 
xxxv; cf. NLW MS 13087E, 113). It is not without 
irony that the man who in 1777 accused Henry 
Rowlands of a local partiality to the ‘exceeding 
pitiful monuments’ of Anglesey should in turn 
Two watercolours by William Owen Pughe (1759-1835). 
Reproduced by kind permission of the National Library 
of Wales 
