Chirk

Aqueduct, Tunnel and Town

Arriving in Chirk, the first thing you see is a row of ten masonry arches carrying a canal seventy feet above the River Ceiriog, with a railway viaduct running alongside it. This is the Chirk Aqueduct, finished in 1801 by William Jessop and Thomas Telford, 710 feet of it, and it straddles the border so precisely that this is one of the few places on Britain's waterways where you can stand with one foot in England and one in Wales. The Llangollen Canal crosses here before disappearing into a tunnel more than 400 metres long, which you can walk through on the towpath if you have brought a torch and don't mind the dark.

The town sits above all this, between the Berwyn Mountains and the wooded Ceiriog Valley, with the medieval bulk of Chirk Castle on the skyline a mile up Castle Road. The main street is a working one — shops, cafes and businesses rather than a parade of boutiques.

Pubs with Character

For a pint, the Bridge Inn at Chirk Bank is the one to know, though everyone calls it the Trap. It sits right beside the aqueduct with a decked patio over the water, and keeps two real ales on at all times, Wainwright Gold plus a rotating guest, alongside Wrexham Lager and ciders. In the centre of town the Hand Hotel is an old coaching inn from the Holyhead-to-London mail road, where a large wooden Welsh dragon presides over the lounge bar and the Coachhouse Restaurant does the sit-down food. The Stanton House Inn, a honey-sandstone Hydes house on Holyhead Road, pours 1863 Mild and serves homemade dishes seven days a week; it is popular, as one regular puts it, with "locals and visitors to Chirk... within walking distance of the Castle and the narrow boat basin." Out among the fields, backed by the Shropshire Union Canal, the Poachers does the same trick more quietly.

Paths into the Valley

The walking is the reason to stay. The Chirk & River Ceiriog Circular runs about six and a half miles from near the station, linking the town to the castle, Offa's Dyke and the river. A shorter circular threads together three long-distance trails at once — Offa's Dyke, the Ceiriog Trail and the Maelor Way — over five and a half miles with some steep pitches.

Battle, Oak and Church

History sits close to the surface here. In 1165 a Welsh army under Owain Gwynedd beat Henry II in the valley and buried the dead in the dyke's ditch at a spot still called Adwy'r Beddau, the pass of the graves. Near the battlefield stands the Oak at the Gate of the Dead, an English oak reckoned to be over a thousand years old, split in two by the cold of February 2010 and now protected by order. St Mary's Church, Grade I listed, keeps its late-medieval carved roofs and a set of eighteenth-century monuments.

Railway and Football Stories

Chirk railway station sits outside the town because the castle's owners insisted the trains not be visible from their windows. The footballer Billy Meredith was born here and started out locally in 1890; his daughter unveiled a plaque to him in 2002.