Just outside of a town named Borth there is the ancient remains of a 4,500-year-old forest.t’s an awe-inspiring sight and a very real reminder of the thousands of years of ancient history underneath our feet.
Since the Bronze Age, the forest has existed on what is now a Welsh beach. In 2014, it was revealed in previously unseen detail after ferocious storms pummelled the Welsh coastline.Stretching between two and three miles along the villages of Ynyslas and Borth, samples taken from the submerged forest suggested the trees flourished between 5,000 and 4,500 years ago.
So far, excavation work on the site has found a Mesolithic tool, flints and a skeleton of an auroch, an ancestor to domestic cattle, found by a local butcher in the 1960s.
Human and animal footprints have also been unearthed, along with scatterings of burnt stones from ancient hearths.
Despite the unrelenting winds, for thousands of years the remnants of the forest have remained preserved thanks to the acidic peat that covered them and deprived them of oxygen – leading to a series of discoveries at the turn of the decade.
