Please note, the majority of properties on the trail are now private residences,

please respect their privacy.

Middlecross

Middlecross lies on the historic agricultural plateau between Llancarfan and Llancadle and has a long history of farming and settlement. The name Middle Crosse appears on the 1622 manorial map of the area, where it identified one of five groups of closes or fields. The surviving field boundaries around Middlecross are thought to preserve elements of an earlier medieval field system, suggesting that the landscape had been divided and farmed for many centuries before the map was made. By the nineteenth century these smaller fields had largely been amalgamated into the larger enclosed fields that still characterise this part of the Llancarfan countryside.

Middlecross is also of particular archaeological interest because of the remains of a medieval ringwork and bailey, sometimes referred to as Middlecross Castle or Llancarfan Castle. The earthwork consists of a roughly circular defended enclosure with an associated bailey and is thought to represent a small early castle, probably constructed in the medieval period. Although much reduced by later agricultural activity, traces of the banks and earthworks survive. The farm itself developed within this long-established agricultural landscape, with historic mapping showing a group of agricultural buildings at Middlecross by 1879. These included a substantial barn and other outbuildings, probably of post-medieval origin. Farming has therefore remained at the heart of Middlecross's history, with the modern farm continuing a tradition of land use that stretches back through the post-medieval period and, in the wider landscape, into the medieval period and earlier.