Carningli

Carningli — Carn Ingli in Welsh, meaning 'Rocky Summit of Angels' — rises behind the town of Newport in the Preseli Hills, its bare quartzite crags visible across a wide swathe of north Pembrokeshire. The name comes from the legend of St Brynach, a sixth-century Irish monk who settled in the area and built himself a hermit cell on the hilltop. There, in solitude among the rocky outcrops, he is said to have conversed directly with angels — hearing their voices on the wind and sometimes seeing them face to face in the changing light of the summit.

The traditions around Brynach are among the oldest strata of Celtic Christianity in Wales. His church at Nevern in the valley below Carningli stands beside an ancient yew churchyard where an Ogham-inscribed Celtic cross still stands. One tale records that Brynach persuaded a wolf and a stag — creatures of the wild hills — to carry timber for a building, animals yielding to the saint's holiness. Another holds that when Brynach died he was carried upward from the summit to heaven by the same angels he had long conversed with there, on 7 April, his feast day.

The tradition that sleeping on the summit of Carningli brings angelic visitation in dreams has persisted into the modern era, and the hill has been used as a site of spiritual retreat for well over a thousand years. The Pembrokeshire Coast National Park designates Carningli as a site of cultural and spiritual significance. The iron-age hillfort whose ramparts still circle the summit adds a further dimension: the hill has been a charged, defended place since at least the seventh century BC.