Conwy to Manchester

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Conwy to Manchester.

Today we leave the countryside we have been enjoying over the last week and tackle another big city. Conwy to Manchester is not very far but Alison has found some forebears in a couple of North Wales locations on the way. The first is Clocaenoy, a tiny village in the hills. It is a narrow single lane road in but there are plenty of passing places. There is a post box and a bus stop at a road junction but that is about it. Surprisingly there is quite a large building project underway for a school and a score or two of new houses. We assume it must be developing as a dormitory village for the surrounding towns. The church we were seeking looked well cared for and the all important cemetery held a small gold mine for the family historian. The headstones here in Wales seem not to erode as quickly as further south so that the inscriptions are very readable over several hundred years.

The next stop was Wrexham, a midsized city with a long pedestrian mall as a high street. The large churches seem all to be under a lot of pressure with falling attendances and high maintenance costs. The local enthusiasts are very keen to point out their historical points of interest and insist on you writing comments in their visitors books as I suppose it helps justify their desperate claims of national significance. As a visitor wandering the graveyard one is often pounced upon and shown the magnificent stained glass, the Romanesque portal or the painted ceiling. The cathedral at Wrexham is the home church of the Welsh Fusiliers so this will give Alison some clues on where to look for her forebear’s military records.

Finally we had to tackle the busy roads of Manchester itself which I had been dreading. It wasn’t so bad in the end. There is a major inner ring road and Alison is getting well skilled as navigator, picking which lane to be in as we come up to each of the seemingly never ending series of roundabouts.

We are staying in an apartment in a leafy inner suburb (Whalley Ranges), in a quiet back street. It seems to be an estate of similar small nineteenth century mansions, well set back and virtually all divided into flats. There is good parking at the front and we will leave the car to sit, gathering a good coating of dust, leaves and bird poo, for the week.

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