Welsh Journals

The One Hundred and Forty-Second Annual Meeting held in Wrexham 14-18 AUGUST 1995 The meeting, held to explore the old Flintshire, was based at Plas Coch in Wrexham, part of the North-East Wales Institute of Higher Education, an Associate College of the University of Wales. It was organised by Vernon Hughes. No meeting booklet was published, but the following notes have been compiled by Derrick Pratt, with additions from Donald Moore. Further details can be found in The Buildings of Wales: Clwyd (Denbighshire and Flintshire), by Edward Hubbard, Penguin Books, University of Wales Press, 1986. MONDAY, 14 AUGUST Derrick Pratt led a visit to Marford and Hoseley, a former maerdref in Maelor Gymraeg (Bromfield), which was from 1541 to 1974 the second largest of Flintshire's nine detached portions. The party assembled at Pant Olwen on top of the hill. Here, in medieval times, bailiffs collected tolls from merchants and travellers who had just emerged from the woods and marshes of the Pass of Pulford. A walk along the old turnpike road, abandoned in c. 1830, took the group past the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel of 1822, now a private house, to the site of the eleventh-century Norman motte built within the ramparts of a promontory fort. It was probably the Domesday curia of Osbern fitz Tesso. The castle was mentioned in the Cheshire Pipe Rolls of 1160-1161, when it was fortified and provisioned at Crown expense in Henry 11's struggle with Gwynedd. Until 1885, as befitted royal and seigneurial status, the castle precincts lay in a detached portion of Allington, a free township. Unfortunately both motte and headland have been largely quarried away for sand and gravel, leaving only vestiges of the ditches and ramparts ('Roft Hollows') that once ran across the neck of the promontory. The quarry is now a Site of Special Scientific Interest. Attention then focussed on Marford's well known Gothic-style cottages ornés, lining the old Chester road at the bottom of the hill. They are grouped about a former cross-roads, the eastern leg of which fell into disuse with the re-alignment of the Chester- Wrexham turnpike in 1828. The B5445 (former A483) has been re-surfaced so many times that it runs at the ground-floor window-sill level of many of the houses. Construction of these cottages began in 1803, but the bulk of the work was achieved between 1813 and 1815 under the auspices of John Boydell, agent to the Trefalyn estate. Many of the buildings are of cob (pise), that is, with structural walls of compacted earth mixed with straw and raised in successive layers between formwork or shuttering. Most may have been thatched originally. All are characterised by cast-iron ogee windows, decorative brick cogging and/or dentilation, and some delightfully bulging apsidal projections with eye-brow pediments and double-ogee eye windows. Especially admired were two Gothic brick privies still surviving to the rear of Beech Mount. Shortage of time meant that the outlying examples of the Gothic style- Marford Hall and Marford Hall Cottages-were glimpsed only fleetingly from the coach, as were Marford's two historic mills. The timber-framed Rossett Mill bears the date 1661 but has earlier antecedents. Across the road Marford Mill, virtually rebuilt in 1791