Meagre remains at Ang Reaksmei

The meagre remains at Neak Ta Ang Tros, near the village of Ang Reaksmei

To give you an idea of what I found with the help of the villagers of Ang Reaksmei, here's a couple of photos. In the top picture, this shrine at Neak Ta Ang Tros sits on top of a small mound of broken bricks that once made up a brick-built prasat, probably pre-Angkorean in age, ie. 6th or 7th century. Neak Ta shrines can contain almost anything which the villagers believe possess special powers and often they are old stones as in this particular shrine, which hosts a few pieces of sandstone that would've most likely been part of the doorframe or the shrine itself within the small prasat. This mound lies about 300 metres from the village.
The bottom photo is of the broken bricks and sandstone pedestals that constitute the remains to be found at Neak Ta Ang Kambot Ka, a ten minute walk from the village across a series of dried-out rice fields. The mound and large holes in the ground suggest to me there were three brick structures in its original form but the site has been completed devastated, like so many others, that's its almost impossible to tell without a detailed investigation by experts. And I am no expert. Whenever I encounter a site like this I see what I can find at the center of the site and then work outwards to see if anything else of interest or value is lying in the surrounding bushes or undergrowth. No doubt the villagers who took me to the site likely thought I was just another crazy barang - though I was the first that had visited the site as far as they knew - but the combination of old sites like this and meeting real Cambodians far off the beaten track is my ideal Sunday excursion. Oh I nearly forgot, they also told me that Ministry of Culture officials had visited the site a few years before and taken away an inscription stone with "old writing" on it, and they only took me to the site because I promised I wasn't going to steal anything!

Three sandstone pedestals like the one in this picture are at Neak Ta Ang Kambot Ka