Caerau Motte

Caerau Motte stands on a quiet rise above the village of Treflys in Powys. It is a simple earthen mound, one of hundreds built across Wales between the late 11th and late 12th centuries. The Normans brought this style of defence from France and Welsh lords soon copied it. A deep ditch usually surrounded such mounds, though Caerau’s ditch has long since filled. Cadw, Wales’ historic environment service, keeps the site on its list of scheduled monuments under number BR130. The mound is part of the largest surviving group of these earthworks anywhere in Britain. Most of them lie along the old borderlands known as the Marches, stretching from Shropshire and Cheshire through Herefordshire into Powys and Flintshire. These small fortresses once guarded routes and farmsteads during a time of shifting loyalties. Their builders used whatever soil and stone lay to hand, piling it up without the stone walls that later castles had. Visitors walk up a gentle slope to the top of the mound. From there the flat fields of the Wye valley stretch away in every direction. The ditch, though shallow now, still marks the edge of the original defences. The air is quiet except for the wind and the occasional farm machine in the distance. No grand ruins stand here, only the grassy hump and the memory of a century when such mounds kept watch over the land.