An Unexpected Discovery

As we shop in Tesco or eat at Café R, some of us will know we are at the site of the former railway station. At Tesco you will be to the east of the main track but at Café R you will be on the track itself where the “The Welsh Chieftain” and “The Festival Land Cruise” and innumerable rural passenger and goods trains ran. An increasing few of us will remember train journeys and school trips and far fewer of us belong to families who worked at the station. None of us have any recollection of what was there before the railway and only now has its surprising distant past come to light. A new book on the history of the mediæval church of St Peter in Ruthin sheds new light on the shape of Ruthin. The church was a college of prists which was dissolved by Henry VIII in the sixteenth century. The church  survived to become the parish church and the ancillary buildings became alms houses and Ruthin’s new school. The college’s lands and assets were sold and in the documents recording the sales is a description of the site of mediæval St Peter’s. These late Tudor documents probably record what I had been there for a long time. The church owned land running from Prior Street eastward down the hill towards Tesco and then along the former railway line towards Well Street. The slope running down the hill along what is now School Road was called the prior’s orchard, a pleasant place no doubt for the priests to relax and a source of fruit for the college’s tables and ciders. At the bottom of the orchards lay the prior’s fishpond. This lay in the natural saucer formed by the slopes where today Wernfechan, Market Street, School Road and Park Road join the Briec roundabout. The orchard and fishpond covered around three acres of land—an appreciable urban area. Close inspection of the remaining natural land formation and early maps suggests the fishpond was at its deepest in the lee of the allotments just behind Tesco and the fishpond may have extended from the area of today’s surgery northwards almost as far as the main access road into the industrial estate. The fishpond was fed by the Fullbrook, which started from the lord's pond south of Dog Lane

and crossed Well Street running alongside the present Station Road and from water flowing down the sides of the slopes as well as from the arterial springs in the vicinity. The college would have needed large quantities of fish to meet the religious dietary regulations of the middle ages and the fishpond may have been established with the college in the early fourteenth century. At that time there were large numbers of labourers in Ruthin engaged by the lord of Ruthin to build his castle, tower defences, the new college and of course his own fishpond and it would have been relatively easy to divert some labour to hollow out the natural saucer around Tesco and the carft centre. Equally easy given the sale of building work in Ruthin at the time would have been the construction of a dam and controls to provide adequate water levels. The fish pond may have beer there for the life of the college—around 250 years—and from the mid sixteenth century to the mid nineteenth century—around 300 years—it became meadow, probably quite a wet one, called Tal y Llyn and all memory of a fishpond disappeared. For a hundred years it became a railway station and since the 1960s it has evolved to become today’s principal retail grocery site for the town.

GARETH EVANS discovers that the Craft Centre, Tesco and much else stands on the Mediæval Priory fishpond