ROCK OF AGES

In northern Pembrokeshire, the bleakly beautiful Preseli Hills provide a thrilling insight into prehistoric civilisations and the runic messages they left behind.

- Kerry Walker

"You have to be careful," warns Phil Wheeler, host at Preseli Hills Cottages, as we huddle over mugs of tea and an OS map tracing the route of the Golden Road, a seven-mile ramble along the spine of the hills. "I was up there the other day and I couldn't see further ahead than this in the fog," he says, his hand a few inches in front of his face. "Lots of the landscape features look alike, which can make navigation tricky. But there's a special atmosphere up there. You feel things." As an ex-military mountain guide and a competitor in the Preseli Beast fell-running race, he's not a man to exaggerate.

The next morning dawns grey and sunless. A red kite whistles as it circles above the tawny, heather-blackened moor, casting a lonely shadow as I pick my way from the trailhead to Foel Eryr ('eagle's peak'). The second-highest peak in the Preseli Hills at 468 metres, its modest summit is topped by a Bronze Age burial cairn. When it's clear, you can see for miles - but today drizzle has blotted out the view entirely.

The spectral mist seems almost suited to the Preseli Hills. Tors litter the landscape like long-buried dragons. And the crags appear less like hills and more like the ghosts of them - vanishing, reappearing, suddenly creeping up. All is silent but for the wind howling around the ragged heights and my own muffled curse as I step into a bog. There's nobody else here but I have the eerie sense of being watched.