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Weston Rhyn |
Weston Rhyn. Lets get this straight: Weston Rhyn is not a pretty village. It sprawls on the edge of what was once an arm of the Shropshire coalfield. Its small Victorian cottages are lost among the estates built by the National Coal Board to house miners & their families. The mines have long since closed and vanished from the landscape and new estates built in the 80's & 90's expanded the village to give it a strange suburban feel. A suburb detached from the town. Rhyn means 'promontory' in Welsh. In this case the promontory it's the strip of higher ground that separates the Morlas brook from the River Ceiriog. This area of land has been a political border for centuries and a geographical border for aeons. To the east lies a plain that was once the bed of a vast lake. The lake, which covered most of North Shropshire and Cheshire, was formed from the meltwater of the last ice age. To the west and north rise the Berwyn Mountains, not particularly grand or impressive in themselves but a sign to any would be invader that things get tougher from here. Humans have lived in this area since the bronze age and probably earlier . At Rhyn, about a mile and a half down the road, the Romans built a legionary fortress. At 48 acres it was comparable to the legionary fortresses at Lincoln & Chester and may have housed 6000 men. It was probably built for one of the 1st century campaigns. Take your pick - AD48 (Ostorius Scapula), AD60 (Suetonius Paulinus) or AD77 (Agricola). Though large it was short lived. It has been speculated that the troops were withdrawn to face the Boudiccan rebellion of AD61. Whatever the reason the great fortress was dismantled and abandoned after, perhaps, just 5 years. A much smaller fort was built later. I'm told that it could have housed a 1000 infantry as well as a 500 strong cavalry regiment. That fort was also abandoned, presumably when the Pax Romana took hold of the area. After the Romans left the Germanic invasions began. The area that we now call 'Wales' was part of a Celtic world from Cornwall to Strathclyde. This world fragmented under Saxon aggression. In 577 the Saxons reached the west coast at Gloucester, isolating Cornwall from the Celtic kingdoms. In 616 the Northumbrians won a battle at Bangor on Dee and took Chester. Deprived of contact with Cumbria and Cornwall, Welsh language and culture evolved its distinctive character and the land of Wales had physical boundaries. Our promontory now lay on a political boundary and, as a consequence, it would experience intermittent warfare for nearly 800 years. In the 7th Century the English kingdom of Mercia built a dyke to mark it's western frontier. Wat's dyke is about a mile east of here. In about 778-796 Offa, the Mercian king, built another dyke, which is 2 miles to the west of us. This area was now in Saxon hands. Some time after this the settlement of Weston took place. It could be that it it took it's name from the farm of a local Saxon called Wes (in which case Wes-ton means the farm of Wes) or it could be that it was the most westerly land in Saxon hands and became known as the West-ton. David Llewelyn Davies favoured the second explanation. Whichever you accept the settlement came to be called Weston Rhyn because of its closeness to the promontory and the need to distinguish it from several other Westons in Shropshire. It is said that the area between the 2 dykes became a sort of neutral zone, where Welsh & English could mingle and trade, I'm a little sceptical about this as the Domesday Book shows the Welsh and English coexisting throughout the Marches. In 1086 the manor of Weston Rhyn had a mixed population of Welsh and English and it was worth the princely sum of 10 shillings a year for its Norman overlord, Rainald de Bailleul. The land had lain waste since the time of Edward the Confessor, when it formed part of the lands of Seward. Rainald fell into disfavour with Henry I and his lands passed, eventually, into the hands of the Fitz-Alans. In 1165 Henry II massed an army of some 30,000 men, many of them levies from his lands in France, and chose this place as the springboard for his invasion of Wales. He crossed the Ceiriog and advanced for a couple of miles but the quickly bogged down in the Berwyns. Already short of supplies and faced with the incessant rain of a Berwyn summer, Henry was retreating back down to the Ceiriog when the Welsh attacked. The Welsh won a major victory, the Battle of Crogen, and no serious English invasion was attempted for 50 years. Warfare would continue, on and off, until the suppression of Owain Glyndwr's rebellion at the beginning of the 15th Century. [To be continued......] | |