Crab Mill Farm, Kinnerton, Flintshire, Wales

Yesterday was a down day from touring but busy none the less. We ended up spending  most of the day in Chester, first hanging about in a launderette  in the north west of the city feeling part of a community, thanks to the warmth and verbosity of the manageress and the regular customers. 

We returned to the Park’n Ride for the sake of pure convenience, and spent much of the day attending to administrative matters in the city. We lunched back down on the riverside, as pleasantly as the other day, and considered returning to the Cathedral to do the free hour long tour but found it closed for the afternoon. 

Instead we spent an hour or so in the Grosvenor Museum which boasts a massive collection of Roman tombstones as the star attraction. There is a small art gallery with some interesting works of art including as a sculpture exhibition of Michael Sandle’s work. His work is very powerful and moving, albeit all about themes from the wars in the Middle East, death and violence. None of this encourages me to possess such works, but makes for an interesting and controversial experience.

But most of our afternoon was spent in the cinema, watching the new Mamma Mia movie, that subtitled “Here we go again”. The cinema was an intimate affair which meant we were privy to the reactions of our fellow theatre goers. Most were women who were seriously affected by the music and storyline; weeping, singing and spellbound. For myself, I felt I was far too stuffy to join in the singing, but for the rest? I am a real softy in a movie theatre.

By the time we emerged from the cinema, the streets were empty of tourists apart from those lingering to dine, and the traffic was heavy; we were glad to be on the bus.

Today was dedicated to a driving tour around this corner of North Wales, through Flintshire and Denbeighshire. I had a long list of default destinations and in the end we covered most of them. Those missed might be mopped up tomorrow although The Chauffeur has expressed an interest in revisiting childhood memories which by themselves cover a rather boring part of the landscape. Tomorrow’s breakfast discussion will sort that out.

Our first destination of the morning was Ruthin, reached via Mold, crossing westward over the Clwydian Range, leaving the gentle rolling dairying land about our camp for the steeper slopes of sheep country. The road descended steeply down into the Vale of Clwyd then onto the slopes of a rise within the vale that is this lovely little township. Alas the hour was early and the place was almost deserted. We parked up near St Peter’s Square, and wandered about admiring the buildings our guide book had alerted us to: the Myddleton Arms built in 1657 in Dutch style topped up with its seven dormer windows, the restored timber framed medieval townhouse Nantclwyd y Dre dating back to 1435 not yet open to the public, the gatehouse to a castle long gone but replaced by a more modern hotel and so much more. We were in search of a newsagent, or the like, to sell us the day’s newspaper but found nothing until we were driving away from the town and spotted the Co-op supermarket.

 

On we drove, now south, climbing up over heights adjacent to Cyrn-y-brain of 565 metres ASL, then on up over the Horseshoe Pass at 417 metres ASL, the remains of past slate quarries and evidence of those still in operation. We were astounded to see great waste piles sitting precariously on the side of the mountain; such a small earthquake would bring it all down over the road and the houses tucked onto the mountainside.

Down and down we came, now descending the Ruabon Mountain into the valley of the River Dee at Llangogollen. This charming settlement along the banks of this river that continues on through Chester was visited by us three years ago; we were keen to explore it once more.

Here at Llangollen, a tourist mecca, is a tourist railway, a horse-drawn canal boat excursion, the remains of the Valle Crucis Abbey which seems to be more a camping ground than a casual tourist destination, and waterfalls, pillars, a motor museum and a dozen other attractions to draw the crowds. As we pulled into the town’s good sized car park, we were joined by four tour buses; the occupants rather spoiling our own private appreciation of the town.  

We walked through the little town, jostled by the German and other foreign tourists, buying wonderful pastries at the local bakery, enjoying the views of the Town Falls from the bridge over the River Dee, wandering along the river paths, then up to the Llangollen canal where we joined others watching a farrier shoeing one of the horses kept for drawing the narrow-boats along the canal.

Here too many join tours along to the next canal “port”, to Trevor which one associates with the Pontcysyllte Viaduct, that which I wrote about at length when we last visited this amazing spot, and shall risk repeating myself here.

The Pontcysyllte Viaduct carries the Llangollen Canal one hundred and twenty seven feet (or thirty nine metres) above the River Dee. As one of the earliest aqueducts to use a cast iron trough it is a monument to the Industrial Revolution and to its designers, Thomas Telford and William Jessop.

Until the mid-1900s the canal carried coal, bricks, iron and chemicals, but the canal went the way of all those we have visited along the way. The current hive of activity around Trevor Basin today can be credited to the Canal & Waterways Trust, and the upward spiral of tourist frenzy.

I was keen to walk across the viaduct again, this very act having been a real challenge to me last time, much to my husband’s amusement. However we first decided to check out the far reaches of the basin, beyond the commercial narrow boat hire business that tends to monopolise the scene. We paused to read a “For Sale” sign on one of the private narrow boats tied up to the canal side, then engaged the owner in conversation, soon  finding we were all from New Zealand. He and his wife are passing six months, less a day or two, in the United Kingdom, travelling in their own water craft rather than a caravan as we do. We shared our stories, finding many parallels, and soon we were given a tour of their home, a real treat, as such small living spaces need to be kept as sacred; we have so little. Perhaps they thought we might be tempted to buy their boat; we had certainly expressed a pipe dream of the same. After some time, we left them to pursue our own schedule, although when we did embark on the high aqueduct walk, rain threatened and shorted the crossing. 

We drove on to our next destination, the National Trust’s Chirk Castle less than five miles south and dined in the car before setting out to explore that which had excited us when we drove up through the long avenue  of oak trees.

Chirk Castle was constructed by Roger Mortimer de Chirk in the late 13^th century, under orders from Edward I as part of the King’s chain of fortresses surrounding North Wales and in recognition of his services in the wars between the two factions. Roger Mortimer was made Justicar of all Wales by Edward II, although in the end, with his greed for power, he took up arms against the king, and was subsequently thrown into the Tower of London and died there in 1326.

The castle changed hands over the years between some of the most important men of the age; the Earls of Arundel, Queen Katherine, widow of Henry IV and mother of Henry V, Cardinal Henry Beaufort, the Dukes of Somerset, Richard Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III, Sir William Stanley, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester and Baron Denbeigh  and so on.

In 1595, Chirk was sold to Sir Thomas Myddelton, the younger son of a prominent North Wales family. He had gone to London to make his fortune and ended up as Mayor of the city, just like Dick Whittington. Thomas was a founding member of the East India Company and helped finance the voyage of Drake and Raleigh, who were really, by all reports, just a couple of pirates.

Happily the castle remained in the family for the next four hundred years, doing the sideways ownership trick only a couple of times.

In 1801 the sister of the childless heir, Richard Myddleton, changed her married name to include her maiden name, Myddleton-Biddulph, thus keeping the castle and estate within the family name, and then Richard who inherited from his father in 1872, resumed the shorter version of the name again, Myddleton.

The last Myddleton, Lieutenant-Colonel Ririd Myddleton died in 1988, without issue. The property had been purchased by the state ten years before, in an effort to meet outstanding death duties, and in 1981, it was conveyed to the National Trust. The family continued to live in the castle until 2004, when Ririd’s widow finally died. However it does seem that there is an on-going arrangement for residential privilege, because relatives turn up occasionally to occupy the apartments in one corner of the castle not open to the public. Sounds like a win-win for the Myddleton’s and not so much for the National Trust.

Having said that, there were crowds of people there today; many of them grandparents with school-holidaying grandchildren. Hopefully the oldies had membership because we thought the entry fee rather steep at about £14 a head.

We enjoyed our visit to the castle, exploring the state rooms open to view, the gardens, both formal and kitchen, the laundries which were once almost of industrial scale when the Howard de Walden family who leased the castle between 1911 and 1946 ran it as a Bothy Laundry. Then the laundry maids lived and worked here, dealing with the washing from all of the family’s houses in London and Scotland, transported to Chirk Railway Station and collected by chauffeur driven car from there. 

Back in the 1600s the estate had covered an astounding 30,000 acres; today it is made up of four hundred and eighty nine acres of parkland, woodland and wood pasture. Apart from the castle and the immediate surrounding grounds which are enjoyed by the visiting public, the rest is a working estate with tenants farming the land.

The formal gardens were originally laid out by Sir Thomas Myddelton II in 1653, and in the 1760s William Emes revamped the landscape, sweeping away much of the earlier design. During the Howard de Walden years it was changed yet again, but the current garden reflects the influence of Lady Margaret Myddelton, who rescued the garden after the Second World War and worked on it right through to her death in 2003, no doubt with lots of willing if not well-paid labourers to do the real work.

I had other excursions on the itinerary but by the time we were finished with Chirk Castle, it was too late to set out on anything new. We headed back home, a straight forward trip skirting around Wrexham and on toward Chester before turning back across the border to Kinnerton.