Mynydd Carningli, Pembrokeshire: The ancient volcano in the shape of a reclining woman

The peak of this remote mountain in West Wales is the next spot to make our Secret Britain list.

Mynydd Carningli, Pembrokeshire.
Mynydd Carningli, Pembrokeshire.
(Image credit: Alamy Stock Photo)

It only takes half an hour to climb this 1,138ft ancient volcano from Newport, but, once at the top, the solitude is tempered only by the whirling of skylarks on the Atlantic wind.

St Brynach is said to have had conversations with angels here in about 450AD, hence the name ‘Mount of Angels’. You’ll also find one of the largest hill forts in west Wales and remains of Bronze Age settlements on the slopes below.

When viewed from the south, Mynydd Carningli resembles a reclining woman, which some associate with an earth goddess.See more of Secret Britain


Annunciata Elwes

Annunciata grew up in the wilds of Lancashire and now lives in Hampshire with a husband, two daughters and an awful pug called Parsley. She’s been floating round the Country Life office for more than a decade, her work winning the Property Magazine of the Year Award in 2022 (Property Press Awards). Before that, she had a two-year stint writing ‘all kinds of fiction’ for The Sunday Times Travel Magazine, worked in internal comms for Country Life’s publisher (which has had many names in recent years but was then called IPC Media), and spent another year researching for a historical biographer, whose then primary focus was Graham Greene and John Henry Newman and whose filing system was a collection of wardrobes and chests of drawers filled with torn scraps of paper. During this time, she regularly gave tours of 17th-century Milton Manor, Oxfordshire, which may or may not have been designed by Inigo Jones, and co-founded a literary, art and music festival, at which Johnny Flynn headlined. When not writing and editing for Country Life, Annunciata is also a director of TIN MAN ART, a contemporary art gallery founded in 2021 by her husband, James Elwes.