Just south of the lovely village of St Nicholas you will find Dyffryn House and Gardens, a splendid Edwardian mansion and grounds, whose garden is teeming with plant species and architectural flourishes. With 22 acres of woodland, themed garden rooms echoing the delights of the Mediterranean, a glasshouse, a café and even a fantastic play area, there’s plenty to see and enjoy for all members of your riding group.

Close by to Dyffryn House & Gardens are the two Neolithic burial chambers of Tikinswood and St Lythans, each over 6000 years old, which actually makes them older than Stonehenge! What we can see are the interiors of what would have been huge earthen mounds, now laid bare to the open sky. The stones that remain are enormous, a testament to the ingenuity of our Stone Age ancestors. If you were to gather a modern village and tell them to move just one of these stones without the use of modern machinery, it would take a very special village to move it even a single metre!

St Lythan’s burial chamber is shaped almost like a balanced deck of cards, with three tall stones propping up a third that miraculously rests atop them, lifted in the distant past and set so firmly under its own weight that it has remained there ever since, from long before the pyramids were raised until after we had landed on the moon.

Tikinswood is an even more impressive example, and more resembles an actual house sunken into the ground. The sheet of stone that caps it is absolutely enormous, weighing 40 tons! That’s about 8 elephants! Historians believe it would have taken at least 200 people to raise it into position, but to modern eyes it seems impossible to achieve without a crane. When you duck underneath it, you almost feel the weight of the stone above you, and for some people they might feel an urge to get back out under the open sky the moment they step down into the chamber.