Guest blog | Did Wrexham Once Have a Priory?

Local writer Eleri Schwartz follows the clues hidden in Wrexham’s streets and history, and asks whether the city once had a priory.

So did Wrexham once have a priory? After all, we do have a Priory Street and an Abbot Street, both within a short walk of St Giles Church.

Maybe the names mean nothing. Streets acquire names for all sorts of reasons, and sometimes those names survive long after their original meaning has been forgotten. That being said, I find in Wrexham there is a meaning behind every street name in our city (town) centre. But there are other things that made me wonder this.

An old gatehouse. A spring. A stone bath. An oak water pipe. An orchard. And an old story I found in Wrexham library archives about a tunnel leading towards the church.

Of course, none of these, on its own, proves anything. But together? Well together they seem to add up to enough for me to be able to write about it.

I do think there may have been a priory in Wrexham, and these are my reasons why.

The street names

Let's start with the obvious. Wrexham has both Priory Street and Abbot Street, situated a short walk from St Giles Church. Priory Street was once known as Priory Lane, so the name certainly isn't a recent invention. I know that doesn't prove there was a priory. It could simply be a name that has been passed down over the years for some reason we no longer know. But it is an interesting place to start. Especially when we look at the building that once sat on this street.

The Priory Gatehouse

Some people may know that what was once called the Priory Gatehouse was later associated with Bryn y Ffynnon House. It was, however, quite different in style from the house itself and appears to have been built first. It also sits at an angle that doesn't quite seem to fit with the later building. That was one of the things that first intrigued me about Bryn y Ffynnon House in the first place and resulted into my delve into its history and eventually a book about the house and its occupants.

Sadly, the Priory Gatehouse, despite being a listed building was demolished. (We don't know who demolished it exactly, although I have my suspicions.)

It is quite an impressive building, and it certainly looks like a gatehouse. But it wasn’t built for Bryn y Ffynnon House. It came first. In fact in some ways it dominated it.

So I did a quick search for priory gatehouses and guess what I found? Bromfield Priory (the irony of the name is not lost on me) has a similar gatehouse, as does Usk Priory.

Perhaps the Wrexham building was the gatehouse to an earlier house. But if that was the case why would the building be demolished and the gatehouse still stand? Which is where things start to get interesting.

What did the old newspapers say?

An 1863 article in the Wrexham Advertiser includes the recollections of Harriet Beauchamp, who was born in 1826 and had attended the school run by the three Misses Kenrick at Bryn y Ffynnon House.

She remembered a “subterraneous passage” which, she said, was believed to lead from Bryn y Ffynnon House towards the church.

There was another story too.

Harriet recalled that some people said that when the building had been a nunnery, those who died there were buried in a cellar underneath the Priory.

Now, this is not proof of anything. Harriet was recalling stories she had heard, rather than describing something she had personally discovered. But she is relating a story just 200 years after Bryn y Ffynnon House was built and would be much closer to the history. A later newspaper also mentions a similar story about nuns and a priory. Maybe the stories were simply local folklore. But no smoke without fire and all that.

A large piece of land

Then there is Thomas Trafford.

The records show that Thomas Trafford, the King's Receiver for North Wales, bought the Priory Gatehouse together with a long strip of land extending from the Gatehouse towards the end of what is now the Dunelm Mill car park. That is quite a sizeable piece of land. And back when the whole land ownership setup was different to today, people who owned large chunks of land had usually received them as a gift from the crown

Which makes me wonder whether this was land that had once belonged to the Church and had subsequently passed into private ownership following the Dissolution of the Monasteries under King Henry VIII. I have to be careful here, because I haven’t found a document saying that is what happened. It is simply one possibility. I won’t go into it here, but you can dig deeper because the land in itself has an interesting history.

But there is another detail in the sale document. An orchard.

The orchard

An orchard isn't particularly unusual, of course. People have planted orchards for centuries,and there is no reason why an orchard on this land must have had anything to do with a religious house. But if there had once been a priory here, an orchard would make perfect sense. Monastic communities needed food, and orchards, kitchen gardens and pasture were all part of everyday life. Older newspaper reports, which are much closer to the earlier accounts also mention a five-acre kitchen garden, with a long wall running along Regent Street.

I try to picture this part of Wrexham before it became covered in buildings, and I have a clear image in my head. The gatehouse on Priory Street behind which sat a priory, and then behind that an orchard and fields stretching all the way to Dunelm Mill and the railway line. It was actually bounded by Wat’s Dyke. And then, just a few feet from the gatehouse was the spring.

The spring and the Cold Bath

It was the spring and the stone bath that first really made me wonder about the possibility of a priory. On a recent trip to Ireland, I came across a ruined abbey with a spring nearby. The spring bubbled up from the ground inside a stone manmade structure, with water running away towards the nearby river. When I discovered similar features in Wrexham, well, my mind started working.

Perhaps it is simply coincidence. But I’m not someone to leave a rabbit hole alone. So I

began to look at the way religious houses managed water, and the setup in Wrexham has similarities throughout the UK.

A N Palmer described Wrexham's old Cold Bath as follows:

“About 30 feet below the well (on the south side of Well Square) there exists an old bath

significantly called ‘The Cold Bath,’ so cold indeed that few submit to the petrifying shock a second time. The refuse water of the well flows into this, and so passes off to the river. The bath is about 14 feet long, 10 feet wide and 5 feet deep.”

It sounds rather unpleasant if you were actually expected to get into it. But the arrangement intrigued me. There was a spring or well. There was a stone bath below it. And the overflow was carried away towards the river.

There is still a photograph of the Cold Bath on the Under A Welsh Sky website, under Well Place.

With a little searching, it is possible to find similar features associated with former monastic sites, including water systems established by monks elsewhere in North Wales. And then buried right at the end of Alfred Palmer's A History of the Town of Wrexham I found something else. The oak pipe.

The oak pipe

I found a new rabbit hole to fall down. Alfred Palmer mentions something that was

discovered when the railway was being constructed.

An old pipe carrying the overflow of water from the well towards the bath or the river.

But it wasn't an ordinary pipe. It was made from the stem of an oak tree.

Palmer explains that the tree had been cut in two along its length and hollowed out. One half was placed in the ground and the other laid on top, with no clasps or couplings. And I am assuming soil then went over it.

So we have an old spring, a stone bath and a wooden pipe carrying the water between them. Which is a well-designed water system.

And it made me wonder whether the oak pipe might tell me something about where the water system came from.

The Cistercian connection

This is where I started looking at other monastic water systems.

At Beaulieu Abbey, Cistercian monks used hollowed-out tree trunks as pipes as part of their water system.

There are other examples too, and the more I looked, the more it became clear that managing water was an important part of life in Cistercian monasteries. To be fair it was the case with all monasteries, but why was I interested in Cistercian monasteries in particular?

The monks of Valle Crucis were Cistercians.

That doesn't mean that they definitely installed Wrexham's oak pipe. There is nothing to

definitively prove that. But it does make it a possibility, I might go so far as to say likely.

Elsewhere, researchers mention similarities between the water systems at Tintern Abbey and Valle Crucis, which suggests that Cistercian communities were using some very sophisticated methods of bringing water into their buildings and carrying it away again.

And this brings us back to Wrexham.

Why Valle Crucis is important

It is easy to forget just how closely Wrexham was connected to Valle Crucis.

Madoc ap Gruffydd gifted land in Wrexham to the monks, including land within the part of the town where the old well was situated. And those monks were Cistercians.

So here, in our locality, we have a Cistercian community with land in Wrexham, an old

spring, a stone bath and a carefully constructed wooden water pipe.

Could they be connected (excuse the pun)? I think so. But I am a storyteller, not a historian. They would definitely want more evidence. That is the problem with historical research. You can sometimes find all the pieces, but you still need extra evidence.

Can we ever find out?

Probably not. An archaeological excavation would be the obvious way to establish whether anything remains beneath this part of Wrexham. And, unfortunately, the whole area is now covered with multi-storey commercial buildings.

So unless someone invents a rather ingenious way of digging underneath the block of land that is bounded by Priory Street, Regent Street, Hill Street and extends beneath Island Green car park without anyone noticing, we are probably going to have to live with the uncertainty. I don’t think that is a bad thing. Because it leaves room for imagination. When I think about this part of Wrexham in the early 1600s, before the railway and the modern buildings, I picture a very different landscape.

Somewhere near what is now Hill Street there may have been a stone religious house with an orchard and kitchen garden behind it, with fields stretching towards Wat’s Dyke.

There was certainly a spring. There was a stone bath. And, at some point, someone laid a hollowed-out oak pipe in the ground to carry the water away.

And then there is that old story about the tunnel. A passage beneath the ground leading towards St Giles. Perhaps it never existed. But then again, maybe it did. And as a writer … well of course I’m going to say there is one there.

That is why I find Wrexham such a romantic town. It is full of stories, facts and legends. A well (still there by the way but repositioned when they built the railway) tunnels, heroes, villains, and people, warm hearted people.

And every time I think I have found the end of the story, another little piece turns up. I

wonder what will be next