A Book of North Wales

by S. Baring-Gould

On the west are the wooded slopes of Bron y Buckley and Gungrog. The little stream that waters the town is the Lledau.

The Severn for some miles above and below Welshpool flows through a broad valley that is a dead level, and stretches to the bases of two ranges of flanking hills which start abruptly from the broad expanse of river flat. That beyond the river is the Long Mynd and then comes the Breidden. This stretch of level is caused by the overflow of the Severn, which floods it all at times, giving to the basin the appearance of a tidal estuary.

North-east of Welshpool is the quaintly shaped Rallt, with the steep side towards the Severn, and dividing that valley from the basin in which stands Guilsfield.

Below the town by Buttington was the scene of a complete overthrow of the Danes by the allied English and Welsh forces, in 894, under Ethelred, Ethelm, and Ethelnoth, eorldermen, whilst King Alfred was engaged in fighting another body of them in Devon. The Danes had formed a camp near the river on low ground, and the Anglo-Welsh army surrounded it. The Danes were in such distress that they ate their horses. Then they burst forth from their camp and fought desperately. Several thanes were slain, “and of the Danishmen was made great slaughter.”

The parish church of Welshpool stands on high ground, and was built about the year 1275. But very little remains of the original church; the lower stages of the tower, with its archway into the nave, and an Early English window in the north gable behind the organ are all. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the nave was rebuilt, with a north and a south aisle; but in the eighteenth century the arcade on the south was removed, and the outer walls rebuilt.

This gives to the church a lop-sided appearance internally, as the chancel arch is thrown on one side of the unusually broad nave. The fine rood-screen was destroyed in or about 1738, when the parishioners appealed to the bishop for permission to remove it, because “a great number of the very common sorte of people sit in it (under pretence of psalm-singing), who run up and down there; some of them spitting upon the people’s heads below.” Hanoverian windows and galleries were added, and the church made as ugly as well could be. It has, however, been taken in hand since, and made more decent. It still retains a fine carved-oak roof in the chancel, supposed to have come from Strata Marcella Abbey.

The key of the church—in Wales nearly every church is kept locked—is kept at a picturesque little black and white cottage at the east end, in which once lived Grace Evans, who assisted Lady Nithsdale, a daughter of the Duke of Powis, in effecting her husband’s escape from the Tower of London.

Lady Nithsdale wrote an account of the whole affair to her sister, and in it she always speaks of the humble Welsh girl Grace as “My dear Evans.”

William Maxwell, fifth Earl of Nithsdale, had been involved in the Jacobite cause, was taken prisoner, and committed to the Tower. “As a Roman Catholic upon the frontiers of Scotland, who headed a very considerable party, a man whose family had signalised itself by its loyalty to the royal house of Stuart would become an agreeable sacrifice to the opposite party,” wrote Lady Nithsdale.

But one day was left before the execution. She appealed to Parliament for permission to intercede with the King for a pardon, and this was granted. She flew to the Tower, and “I told the guards as I passed by that the petition had passed the House—I gave them some money to drink to the Lords and to His Majesty.”