Scheduled monuments are sites of archaeological importance with specific legal protection against damage or development.
Ceredigion is a large rural county in West Wales. It has a long coastline of Cardigan Bay to the west and the remote moorland of the Cambrian Mountains in the east, with the mountainous terrain of Plynlimon in the northeast. Ceredigion has a total of 264 scheduled monuments. That is too many to have on a single list page, so for convenience the list is divided into two, 163 prehistoric sites and 101 Roman, Medieval and Post Medieval sites.
Gwynedd is a large rural county in North Wales. The northern half includes the high mountains of Snowdonia and the mixed farmland and hills of the Llŷn peninsula, which between them make up much of the former county of Caernarfonshire. The southern part of Gwynedd is the softer coastal and upland landscapes of the former county of Merionethshire. Gwynedd, the second-largest county in Wales, has a total of 497 scheduled monuments. That is too many to have on a single list article, so for convenience the list is divided into three. The 365 prehistoric sites are in two lists, covering 171 sites in former Merionethshire, and 194 sites in former Caernarvonshire. The 132 sites dating from Roman to modern times are included in a single list covering the whole of the county. Gwynedd is a unitary authority comprising most of the two historic counties. In 1974 it also merged with Anglesey, and the merged county was also called Gwynedd. Since 1996 Anglesey has been a separate county again.
Pembrokeshire is the fifth-largest county in Wales, but has more scheduled monuments (526) than any except Powys. This gives it an extremely high density of monuments, with 33.4 per 100 km2.. With three-quarters of its boundary being coastline, Pembrokeshire occupies the western end of the West Wales peninsular, terminating with the tiny cathedral city of St David's. It was a historic county in its own right but between 1975 and 1996 it joined Carmarthen and Ceredigion in the much larger county of Dyfed.
Powys is the largest administrative county in Wales. With over a quarter of Wales's land area, covering much of the eastern half of the country, it is a county of remote uplands, low population and no coastline. It was created in more or less its current form in 1974, and is the only one of the large county units created at that time to have been carried forward intact at the 1996 local government re-organisation. It comprises three historic counties, namely Montgomeryshire, Radnorshire, and most of Brecknockshire. There are 950 scheduled monuments within the county. This is far more than can be sensibly covered in one list, so each of the 3 historic counties is therefore listed separately, and each of these has two lists - one for the prehistoric sites and one for the Roman, medieval and post-medieval sites.
Banc y Betws or Betws Castle, is a motte and scheduled ancient monument in Wales. It is located in Llangyndeyrn, in the Gwendraith Valley in Carmarthenshire, Wales. All that is visible of the structure nowadays is a mound capped with trees and the remains of the ditch that surrounded it.
The archaeology of Wales is the study of human occupation within the country of Wales which has been occupied by modern humans since 225,000 BCE, with continuous occupation from 9,000 BCE. Analysis of the sites, artefacts and other archaeological data within Wales details its complex social landscape and evolution from Prehistoric times to the Industrial period. This study is undertaken by academic institutions, consultancies, charities as well as government organisations.
