Prehistory
If you are looking at prehistory, by definition, the amount of information available is limited. Studies either take very specific locations where unusual finds have occurred or deal with very large areas. They inform those studies by reference to information from a range of the same specific locations. If, by contrast, you take a specific parish, you have to work back from these two sources and make some tentative suggestions about your ‘patch’.
Prehistory – up to 400 AD
- The earliest indications we have of people in Wales is from over 200,000 years ago. They would have lived as hunter-gatherers.
- We can be pretty sure that no one was living in the area which became Lambston between 115,000 and 12,000 years ago. This part of Pembrokeshire was close to the southern limit of glacial activity.
- So if we could see our landscape even 12,000-10,000 years ago, we might have a tundra vegetation, with valleys scoured out with meltwater.
- If you imagine a major glacier to the north and west could this be why the Pelcomb Brook flows east to the Cleddau rather than west to the sea? Could bigger volumes of meltwater explain some rather deep/steep valleys carved by today’s very small streams?
- As temperatures rose, woodland would have spread from the south and east to cover the landscape by about 8000 years ago.
- Farming in Wales started around 6000 years ago and the woodland began to be cleared.
- We have clear evidence of people living and working near here as early as six or seven thousand years ago. These are from excavations at Nab Head just south of St Brides Haven.
- The earliest traces we have of people living in what later became Lambston are a series of ‘Raths’ – Iron age defended settlements. The Dyfed Archaeological Trust identify four raths in Lambston – at Walesland, East Hook, Westhill Fold and Berry Hill (Castelborg). The Walesland Rath is thought to have been occupied from around 300 BC to 400 AD.
So in seven bullet points we have jumped from over 200,000 to less than 2000 years ago.
The first millenium AD
But if ‘pre-history’ is the things that happened before we have anything written down; we have another 1000 years where we have no written records in the area.
- The absence of records does not, I am sure, indicate that no one lived here. There would have been welsh communities living and farming in the area. They would have kept records.
- But we don’t have any place names or people’s names or any archaeological records from this period in this area.
- This may be to some extent because of lack of research. Maybe if I could speak welsh, I could find something more, but without even a place name, a search is tricky.
- It may be that the norman and flemish invaders of the area drove out the existing inhabitants and destroyed records or structures that they had made.
- The only possible remnants from this time may be the boundary of the parish itself – there is some thought that Norman parish boundaries were based on pre-existing cantref boundaries. The other possible indication is that the parish church of St Ismael was dedicated to a celtic saint, so perhaps the dedication is one of the survivals. (The church was closed in the 2010s and is now a holiday cottage)
The Norman Invasion
- The first written records of this location, come from after the Norman invasion of Pembrokeshire. It may be that more was going on, or that more was recorded or simply that more records survive.
- A document dated 1219, referring to Sutton, gives the first mention of a place in the parish. A tax record mentions ‘Ecclesia Villa Lamberti’ in 1291. More information about the names of places in the parish is detailed here.
- So it is only from the start the 13th century that we really have a named place to write about.