As hotel names go, this one’s a little unusual. Across Church Street, in the Welsh Border town of Chirk, is the Hand Hotel.
Parts of it date back to 1610, during the reign of James I, making it one of the oldest hotels in North East Wales.
Church Street was originally part of Thomas Telford’s great road linking London with Holyhead, which put the Hand Hotel in a perfect position to serve travellers.
Suddenly, the breeze teases my nose with a heavenly chocolate aroma. In the distance, I spy the Mondelez factory. This is where they roast the cocoa beans and turn them into chocolate, ready to make Cadbury products at factories across Britain.
But I can’t stand here all day savouring the aroma. I’m here to explore the Ceiriog Valley.
The River Ceiriog flows for twelve miles, starting high in the Berwyn Mountains, cascading eastwards to join the River Dee soon after Chirk.
It’s the town’s location, perched above the confluence of these two rivers, that saw the construction of several man-made structures. The oldest is Chirk Castle.
To get there, I have to pass the castle’s entrance, dominated by a pair of magnificent white wrought-iron gates. Commissioned by Sir Richard Myddleton in 1712, the gates took seven years to make.
But they’re not completely white, for at the top is the Myddleton family shield and a bright red hand. Ah! Is this a clue to the Hand Hotel’s name?
Roger Mortimer built Chirk Castle in the thirteenth century to subdue the Welsh. Its huge circular tower walls are five feet thick, and their shrewdly placed arrow slits enabled relatively few archers to protect a wide area from attack.
It wasn’t until the late sixteenth century that Chirk Castle became a home, when Sir Thomas Myddleton, one of the founder East India Company investors, bought it.
During the Civil War, the Myddleton family supported the Royalists, so when Charles II was restored to the throne, he rewarded them with a baronetcy. This entitled them to include the symbol of the Arms of Ulster, a red hand, on their coat of arms.
So it seems the Hand Hotel’s name was chosen to keep in with the local landowner!
Chirk Castle gardens has one of the best views in Wales, which, ironically, stretches east across England. I can just make out the Peak District from here.
But I’m heading west, and as I drop into the Ceiriog Valley I spy three more of Chirk’s marvellous man-made structures.
The Llangollen branch of the Shropshire Union Canal has to cross the Ceiriog Valley, and to do that Thomas Telford built an aqueduct, carrying the canal seventy feet above the River Ceiriog.
Forty-five years later, Chirk Viaduct was built alongside to carry the Shrewsbury to Chester railway line across the valley. At ninety-eight feet tall, rail passengers look down on canal users. There’s also a towpath, so anyone can walk across, if they have a head for heights!
Canal boaters not only need a head for heights but also a head for tunnels. Once across the aqueduct, the canal heads through the 1,381-foot long Chirk tunnel. Towpath users need a torch because it’s pitch black in the middle!
My vantage point, halfway along the aqueduct, perfectly frames the Ceiriog Valley.
Had it not been for David Lloyd George, who was Prime Minister between 1916 and 1922, this view could have been influenced by industrial plans to flood the valley higher up.
In 1923, Warrington needed more water for its growing population and its burgeoning brewing industry. The town’s surveyors identified the Ceiriog Valley as the ideal location for two reservoirs, which would have flooded over thirteen thousand acres of the valley.
Understandably, every Welsh MP opposed this plan, and Lloyd George described the Ceiriog Valley as “a little bit of heaven on Earth.”
His comments, along with those of others, helped save the Ceiriog Valley.
Today, the B4500 meanders alongside the river, as the rescued watercourse gurgles and froths its way towards the Dee. For the last five miles of its journey to the Dee, the river is also the boundary between England and Wales.
At Pontfadog, I stumble across what looks like the world’s smallest railway station. It’s actually a one-room tramway station.
However, many locals briefly called it the Town Hall after an officious public servant used the building to collect local taxes!
The Ceiriog Valley might be peaceful today, but it was bustling with industry between the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. The surrounding hills are rich in china stone, coal, granite, limestone, silica, slate, and volcanic ash deposits.
To meet the demand for these materials, the valley desperately needed a way of transporting these quarried goods to the canal at Chirk.
Officials originally proposed a standard gauge railway, but at £120,000, they deemed it too expensive. The solution was a horse-drawn narrow-gauge railway, which only cost £25,000.
A couple of miles further up the valley is Glyn Ceiriog, home to the Glyn Ceiriog Tramway and Industrial Heritage Museum. It’s housed inside the Grade II listed engine shed. Outside, a two-ton crane dominates the entrance.
Passenger services began from here in 1873, and it took forty-five minutes to travel the six miles to Chirk. The return journey took an hour, probably because it was uphill!
In 1885, officials granted permission to extend the tramway north to the hamlet of Pandy. The National Trust owns part of this track-bed, which runs alongside the River Ceiriog. Here, the river is frenetic, for it’s over 650 feet above sea level.
Glancing up to my right, I spy Pandy Crags. These were quarried to extract the mineral deposits, including china stone, which manufacturers used to give their porcelain an opaque look.
Pandy is dominated by a huge stone building beside a tributary of the River Ceiriog. Now a private dwelling, this was Wales’s oldest fulling mill. Here, workers cleaned wool using a process that involved scouring and pounding. Not only was water from the river used in the cleaning process, but the river also powered the machinery.
Three miles upstream, at the end of the B4500, is Llanarmon Dyffryn Ceiriog, or Llanarmon DC, for short. This translates into English as The Church of St Garmon in the Valley of the River Ceiriog.
St Garmon’s is fascinating. Not only are there two 1,000-year-old yew trees by its front porch, but when the church was rebuilt in 1846, builders found a hoard of one hundred fifteenth-century coins dating from Edward IV’s reign.
At 900 feet above sea level, Llanarmon DC sits on the edge of the Berwyn Mountains and lies at the junction of two old droving routes. For centuries, drovers brought cattle across the mountains, often resting here overnight.
To serve these sixteenth-century drovers, two farmsteads here became hotels, and both are still in business today. One is called the West Arms, named after the family who once owned Ruthin Castle, and the other…
Well, guess what? The other is called The Hand, after the Myddleton’s at Chirk Castle.
Lloyd George and his compatriots were right to campaign to save this valley from being flooded. At the time, they saved one church, five chapels, two burial grounds, two schools, two post offices, two pubs, six shops, and eighty-two homes and buildings.
But we’d have lost a lot more than that. We’d have lost all this social and economic history, and as Lloyd George put it, “a little bit of heaven on earth.”
You could say that back then, the Ceiriog Valley was in good hands. And with a hand still at either end of the valley today, I think that deserves a round of applause.
© Simon Whaley