By about 2400 BC, bronze metal tools were becoming increasingly available.
Traditionally, the metal users of the Bronze Age were considered to have been ‘migrants’ to Britain, and the prehistory of Britain was portrayed in terms of wave after wave of invaders - at least, ‘that’ is what I was taught in school, but, archaeologists now believe that the discovery was made by local people who were already living here.
The Great Orme mine in Llandudno North Wales, is a magnificent ‘museum’, if you will, of ancient Copper (malachite) workings from this early period. Although I have never been there, I have watched quite a few t.v. programmes about the site – it is truly amazing! The ‘tools’ these people used to extract the Malachite – animal bones (!) and heavy palm held stones, shows the determination of the people.
To make Bronze, they also needed ‘Tin’ to mix with the Malachite. There are no tin mines in Wales. They do however, have them a bit lower down the country, in Cornwall !!
So, these peoples must have started ‘trading’ from North Wales, down to Cornwall. The most obvious mode of transportation would have been by ‘boat’ (even if a canoe type vessel).
The present tendency is to stress continuity rather than disruption and to maintain that Wales had received the greater part of its original stock of peoples by 2000 BC - a notion that seems to be confirmed by genetic studies. The standard of Bronze Age metalwork could be astonishingly high.
The most intriguing aspect of Bronze Age Wales is the link between the Preseli Mountains (mid- Wales) and the Downs of Wiltshire (Salisbury Plain). Sometime after 2000 BC, a circle of about eighty blue stones, each of them weighing about four tons, were erected at Stonehenge. They are believed to have been quarried from the rock of the Preseli Mountains and carbon testing agrees that the similarities of the stones, confirm their origin.
There has been has been much speculation about the way they were transported to the Wiltshire Downs, and about the motivation of those who transported them.
(Personally, I think it was willpower and perseverance)! lol