Dinmore (city of the welsh) Time team Hereford Times report

[hedgehog]

More info on the story that WBM posted.

A nemeton sounds like a scary place the priests wouldn't go there at midday and midnight in case they met the gods, place of sacrifice with lots of blood!
Excerpt from the Hereford Times.

A SACRED site for sacrifice and other rituals to prehistoric gods may be one of Herefordshire’s strangest archaeological finds yet.

Whatever was uncovered during the dig at Dinmore is said to have scared the county’s Roman occupiers so much they levelled it.

Yet so far, there is no evidence of sustained occupation at what was first thought to be an Iron Age hill fort, making its mysteries all the more alluring.

Samples from the dig are being carbon-dated for clues, but there’s speculation it has exposed a huge nemeton or sacred grove spread over 43 acres where rituals, including sacrifice, were performed by Druids to please those gods worshipped by early Britons.

The nemeton theory is the first – and most obvious – to explain the site’s fortifications, absence of sustained occupation, and apparent levelling, probably by the Romans who had a sizeable presence of their own at nearby Credenhill.

County archaeologist Dr Keith Ray said: “What the Romans even thought went on in a nemeton was frightening enough for them. But a nemeton would also have been seen as a focus for resistance to Roman rule.”

Dinmore has long been seen as a likely site for an Iron Age find and Channel 4’s Time Team has already made a programme to be shown early next year. But the first results from the carbon dating could be ready for the annual Herefordshire Archaeology symposium in October.

The nemeton – if that is what it is – joins a series of finds made over the past few years alone that are re-defining what was known about prehistoric Herefordshire.

There are traces of early man being active in Herefordshire from 250,000 years ago, but it is not until around 4,500BC that a clear presence is evident.

In Hereford, the first full evidence of occupation dates to around 3,750-3,530BC, known as the early Neolithic period.

It was a time of intense economic and social change as hunting, fishing, and gathering gave way to settled agriculture.

[waltonbasinman]

To follow on from this as well the first recorded enclosures made by man are called Causewayed Enclosures like Windmill Hill near Avebury in Wiltshire. Last Year in the Walton Basin near Old Radnor in Powys one of these enclosures was found dating to about 3,500 BC. Now less than 3 miles away near Kington just over the border in Herefordshire another has been found that appears to be one of the largest ever found. You heard it here first folks and a long time before any body else knows. I know you will be most unlikely to find anything Metal their but it is another huge piece in the jigsaw of the history of the United Kingdom