Mold

A Micropub and Market-Town Appetite

The Mold Alehouse has no television, no spirits and no food. It has four cask ales, five KeyKeg lines and four ciders, and in 2022 CAMRA named it the best pub in the whole of Wales. It opened in 2016 near the bus station, opposite Daniel Owen Square, and the regular ales include Hafod, brewed in the town, alongside Cwrw Iâl and Facer's. There is nowhere to sit and eat, which is the point.

For food you go to the edges. The Glasfryn sits at Sychdyn, next to Theatr Clwyd, a Brunning & Price dining pub with a garden terrace that looks over the town toward the Clwydian Range; from three in the afternoon the Fryn Bach BBQ runs in the garden, and there are a few dog-friendly tables. Pen y Bont Farm, on Chester Road, is a gastropub in a Grade II listed former farm building, with high wooden beams, exposed brick and a sunny beer garden.

Market Days and Stanley Stonework

On Wednesdays and Saturdays the street market fills the square and High Street with more than seventy traders — fruit and veg, cheese, meat, clothes and plants — with livestock trading on Mondays and Fridays. On the first and third Saturday of the month, Celyn Farmers' Market sets up in St Mary's Church Hall on King Street. Mold was the first town in Wales admitted to the Cittaslow "slow town" movement.

St Mary's itself is Grade I listed, a Perpendicular Gothic church of around 1490 on the site of a Norman one. Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry VII, is linked to its building in thanks after the Battle of Bosworth, and the stonework carries the heraldry of the Stanley family — the Eagle and Child, and the Three Legs of Man from their years as Lords of Mann. The landscape painter Richard Wilson lies in the churchyard.

Castle Mound and Golden Ghosts

Above the High Street the wooded mound of Bailey Hill is what remains of the Norman motte-and-bailey castle the town grew around from the 1070s, reputedly destroyed by Owain Glyndŵr. It is now a public park with woodland walks, a children's play area and tea rooms.

In 1833, workmen quarrying stone at Bryn yr Ellyllon, the Hill of the Goblins, found a cape of solid sheet gold wrapped around a skeleton. It is Bronze Age, roughly a kilogram of gold, and now sits in the British Museum. Travellers were said to avoid the hill after dark, where a ghostly boy clad in gold had been seen.

From the Alyn Valley to Moel Famau

The walking rises quickly out of the valley. Moel Famau, at 554 metres the highest of the Clwydian hills, carries the Offa's Dyke Path over its summit and the Jubilee Tower, with views to the Dee Estuary, the Wirral and Liverpool. Closer in, Loggerheads Country Park follows the River Alyn under limestone cliffs, past a walkway over the Devil's Gorge, a restored water mill and riverside tea gardens. Buckley station is about four miles off, with Flint and its direct trains to Cardiff, London and Manchester reachable by bus; the A494 puts Chester within half an hour.

Daniel Owen's Mold

Daniel Owen, born in Mold and regarded as the father of the Welsh-language novel, stands in bronze in the square that carries his name. The inscription is his own: "Not for the wise and learned have I written, but for the common people."