Brymbo Hall

Grid reference: SJ293534
329382, 353405
Bearing: SSW

This is roughly where Brymbo Hall stood.

The Hall was the official residence of the steelworks boss in days long gone by, and a story has been handed down about it:

The boss' daughter was to be married off to someone she didn't care for at all. But, this being the nineteenth century, her views counted for just a gnat's whisker above zero. And so the ceremony went ahead.

It was followed, as one would expect, by a Grand Ball in the Hall itself that evening.

At one point, someone noticed that the bride was nowhere to be seen. A search party was sent out, and eventually found the poor girl in an attic bedroom, having hanged herself rather than face Bedtime With Bozo.

While someone went downstairs to break the news to the rest of the party, the girl was cut down, and they closed the shutters on the windows (which were flapping in the strong breeze) before leaving the room.

The groom and the bride's family came hurtling up to the attic to see for themselves, to find that the shutters had come loose, and were once again clattering in the wind. They were secured again, this time with steel wire.

After a suitable period of grief, everyone went back downstairs to await the arrival of the vicar or the undertaker (the latter, one feels, would have been of more practical use), leaving the corpse once again unattended.

Some time later, when the priest arrived, the family traipsed sombrely back up to the attic once more...to find that the shutters were again free and swinging about unhindered.

And, so the story goes, from that night on the shutters on the window of that room would never stay closed.

The Hall gradually fell into disuse (later holders of the post of top bod at the steelworks were given the use of a large house at the other end of the village); at one time in the mid-1960s, the lower storeys were used to house pigs, although the grand main staircase remained; and the Hall was demolished and its land subjected to open-cast coal mining in the early 1970s, which is why it looks so undistinguished now.

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Many thanks to Keith Williams for correcting me about the dates of the Hall's fall into dereliction. Keith also adds the following:

"I remember the attic rooms and most of the bedrooms had a dado rail and picture rail of square tiles about 4"x4" white with a Tudor rose on each tile. They were made out of a sort of plaster. There were literally thousands of them; we used to shoot them with air rifles.

"The top attic had dozens and dozens of beautiful paintings still in their frames, all just thrown in a pile in the middle of the floor, broken and neglected. Didn't really mean anything to us as kids, but they must have been worth thousands and they probably just burned them.

"The staircase was a long curved one, solid oak, about 8 feet wide. Would cost today many many thousands of pounds. The main door in front of the stairway was around 8ft tall and about 4" or more thick. Inside the corridor, there was a mark where a door had once been and had been bricked up. We broke the wall down and inside was the original bakery for the hall. There were many little ovens and even some pots and pans, no one had been in there for years."

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Grid reference: SJ293529
Co-ordinates: 329345, 352960
Bearing: S

There's nothing significant about this picture; I just thought it looked nice.

This footpath skirts the eastern side of the old Hall site and is on the western flank of the old steelworks site, meeting up with the back road towards Tanyfron and Wrexham by Tŷ Cerrig.

I don't know how many times I've walked this path down the years: going to football matches at the Steelworks Sports Club; walking the four miles down to Wrexham on a Friday evening to join my friends for a couple of convivial hours in The Nag's Head or The Walnut Tree when I was in my late teens; or simply to get out of the house for a bit, as on this occasion.

© Nigel Stapley